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www.nakedcapitalism.com
VatchroadriderJKF? I didn't know that the historian John King Fairbank was assassinated.
skkThen I guess you have solid evidence to account for the actions of Allen Dulles, David Atlee Phillips, William Harvey, David Morales, E. Howard Hunt, Richard Helms, James Angleton and other CIA personnel and assets who had
1) perhaps the strongest motives to murder Kennedy
2) the means to carry out the crime, namely, their executive action (assassination) capability and blackmail the government into aiding their cover up and
3) the opportunity to carry out such a plan given their complete lack of accountability to the rest of the government and their unmatched expertise in lying, deceit, secrecy, fraud.
Because if you actually took the time to research or at least read about their actions in this matter instead of just spouting bald assertions that you decline to back up with any facts you would find their behavior nearly impossible to explain other than having at, the very least, guilty knowledge of the crime.
skkRuby claimed he was injected with cancer in jail, which ultimately rendered his second trial (after winning appeal overturning his death sentence) moot. It sounded crazy, but so did the motive proffered at his first trial-- that he wanted to save Mrs. Kennedy the anguish...
that is such an amazing story.. i've yet to watch the video of Lyndon Johnson's swearing in - where Marr states he's seen to be winking and smiling etc -
Jim Marrs - Kennedy Assassination Lecturethose who wish - Pick it up at around 12 minutes. actually in that lecture he may well be showing videos of it - I wdn't know cos just listen to the audio.
JFK is the one 'safe' conspiracy to talk about without getting the extreme whacko label.
fascinating "lectures" - British Humanist Society and all - still you gotta listen to everything especially the other side:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/V6s_Jw3RU9g?feature=oembed&wmode=opaque&list=PL44BEE83ED9D841A8Make a note of the names - rising stars in the I'm "left" but I'm not a conspiracist gaggle - ist a standard gaggle - Chomsky, Monbiot are in it ( to win it of course - their fabled "socialist" kingdom" ) - yeah yeah its BritLand so yeah why I care I suppose.
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www.nakedcapitalism.com
Mussolini-Style Corporatism, aka Fascism, on the Rise in the US naked capitalism
Uahsenaa, November 3, 2015 at 11:26 am
I want to expand on the point about feudalism, since it's even more apt than the article lets on. It was not "rule by the rich," which implies an oligarchic class whose members are more or less free agents in cahoots with one another. Rather, feudalism is a hierarchical system of distributed administration. A king is nominally in charge or "owns" a kingdom, but he has lords who administer its first primary division, the fiefdom. Lords in turn have vassals, who administer further subdivisions or, in the cases of smaller fiefs, different aspects of governance. Vassals may have their own captains and middle managers, typically knights but also clerks and priests, who in turn employ apprentices/novices/pages who train under them so as to one day move up to middle management. If this is starting to resemble modern corporate structure, then bonus points to you.
This means feudalism found a way to render complicit in a larger system of administration people who had no direct and often no real stake in the produce of its mass mobilization of labor. Anyone in a position of vassalage was dependent upon the largess of his immediate patron/lord/whatever for both his status and nominal wealth. The lowest rungs of the administrative ladder were responsible for keeping the peasants, the pool of labor, in line either through force or through the very same system of dependence upon largess that frames the lord/vassal relationship. Occasionally, the peasants recognize that no one is below them in this pyramid scheme, and so they revolt, but for the most part they were resigned to the status quo, because there seemed to be no locus of power to topple. Sure, you could overthrow the king, but that would do nothing to deter the power of the lords. You could overthrow your local lord, but the king could just install a new one.
Transpose to the modern day. A CEO may resign in disgrace over some scandal, but that does little to challenge the underlings who carried out his orders. You might get your terrible boss fired for his tendency to sexually harass anyone who walks in the door, but what's to stop the regional manager from hiring someone who works you to the bone. Sometimes the peas–err, employees revolt and form a union, but we all know what means have been employed over the years to do away with that.
tl;dr – Feudalism: it's about the structure, not the classes
Lambert Strether, November 3, 2015 at 2:19 pmHmm. I don't think a serf can be a vassal. The vassals sound a lot like the 20%. The serfs would be the 80%. I'm guessing class is alive and well.
James Levy, November 3, 2015 at 2:38 pm
You wouldn't be a vassal (that was a very small percentage of the population) but you could have ties of patronage with the people above you, and in fact that was critical to all societies until the Victorians made nepotism a bad word and the ethic of meritocracy (however bastardized today) took shape. If you wanted your physical labor obligation converted into a money payment so you could spend more time and effort on your own holding, or you needed help in tough times, or the 99 year lease on your leasehold was coming due, or you wanted to get your son into the local priory, etc. you needed a friend or friends in higher places. The granting or refusal of favors counted for everything, and kept many on the straight and narrow, actively or passively supporting the system as it was.
Uahsenaa, November 3, 2015 at 2:39 pm
It's not that peasants can be vassals in the overall order so much as they are in the subject position, but without the attendant capacity to then lord it over someone beneath them. Lord/vassal in feudalism are also generic terms to describe members of a fixed relationship of patronage. It's confusing, because those terms are also used for levels of the overall hierarchy.
The true outliers here are the contemporaneous merchants, craftsmen, and freeholders (yeomen) who are necessary for things to run properly but are not satisfactorily accounted for by the overall system of governance, in part because it was land based. Merchants and craftsmen in particular tended not to be tied to any one place, since their services were often needed all over and only for limited periods of time. The primary administrative apparatus for craftsmen were the guilds. Merchants fell into any number of systems of organization and often into none at all, thus, according to the old Marxist genealogy, capitalism overthrows feudalism.
Peasants may have had something like a class consciousness on occasion, but I'm not entirely convinced it's useful to think of them in that way. In Japan, for instance, peasants were of a much higher social status than merchants and craftsmen, technically, yet their lives were substantially more miserable by any modern economic measure.
visitor, November 3, 2015 at 4:01 pm
I think that the article gets it seriously wrong about feudalism - an example of what Yves calls "stripping words of their meaning".
First of all, feudalism was actually an invention of an older, powerful, even more hierarchical organization: the Catholic Church.
The Church realized early on that imposing its ideal of a theocratic State ("city of God") led by the Pope upon the strong-headed barbarian chiefs (Lombards, Franks, Wisigoths and others) that set up various kingdoms in Europe was impossible.
Hence the second best approach, feudalism: a double hierarchy (worldly and spiritual). The populations of Europe were subject to two parallel hierarchical authorities with taxation, judicial and other economic powers (such as the right to determine when and for whom to work).
Second, there was a class of wealthy people which did not quite fit in the feudal hierarchy - in particular, they had no vassals, nor, despite their wealth, any fiefdom: merchants, financiers, the emerging burger class in cities. They were the ones actually lending money to feudal lords.
Third, the problem for underlings was never to overthrow the king (this was a hobby for princely families), and extremely rarely the local lord (which inevitably brought the full brunt of the feudal hierarchy to bear on the seditious populace).
Historically, what cities and rural communities struggled for was to be placed directly under the authority of the king or (Holy Roman Germanic) emperor. This entailed the rights to self-administration, freedom from most egregious taxes and corvées from feudal seigneurs, recognition of local laws and customs, and the possibility to render justice without deferring to local lords.
The king/emperor was happy to receive taxes directly from the city/community without them seeping away in the pockets of members of the inextricable feudal hierarchy; he would from time to time require troops for his host, hence reducing the dependency on troops from his vassal lords; and he would rarely be called to intervene in major legal disputes. Overall, he was way too busy to have time micromanaging those who swore direct allegiance to him - which was exactly what Basque communities, German towns and Swiss peasants wanted.
Therefore, an equivalence between feudalism and the current organizational make-up of society dominated by for-profit entities does not make sense.
Lambert Strether, November 3, 2015 at 4:11 pm
"the problem for underlings was never to overthrow the King"
Not even in the peasant revolts?
visitor, November 3, 2015 at 5:15 pm
If you look at this list, it appears that they were revolts directed against the local nobility (or church) because of its exorbitant taxation, oppressive judiciary, rampaging mercenaries and incompetent leadership in war against foreign invasions.
The French Jacquerie took place when there was no king - he had been taken prisoner by the English and the populace blamed the nobility for the military defeats and the massive tax increases that ensued.
During the Spanish Guerra de los Remensas, the revolted peasants actually appealed to the king and he in turn allied with them to fight the nobles.
During the Budai Nagy Antal revolt, the peasants actually asked the Hungarian king to arbitrate.
In other cases, even when the king/emperor/sultan ultimately intervened to squash the revolt, the insurrection was directed against some local elite.
Peasants revolts in 16th century Scandinavia were against the king's rule, but they were linked to reformation and took place when feudalism was on the wane and the evolution towards a centralized monarchical state well advanced.
Apparently, only the John and William Merfold's revolt explicitly called for the overthrow of the English king.
Jim Haygood, November 3, 2015 at 4:51 pm
'The populations of Europe were subject to two parallel hierarchical authorities with taxation, judicial and other economic powers (such as the right to determine when and for whom to work).'
Just as Americans are subject to two parallel hierarchical authorities with taxation and judicial powers, the states and the fedgov.
Before 1914, federal criminal laws were few, and direct federal income taxation of individuals was nonexistent. Today one needs federal authorization (E-verify) to get a job.
Now that the Fifth Amendment prohibition on double jeopardy has been interpreted away, notorious defendants face both federal and state prosecution. Thus the reason why America has the world's largest Gulag, with its slam-dunk conviction machine.
Uahsenaa, November 3, 2015 at 4:58 pmExcept, first off, there were non-Christian societies that made use of the system of warrior vassalage, and the manorial system that undergirded feudal distribution of land and resources, as least as far as Bloch is concerned, is a fairly clear outgrowth of the Roman villa system of the late empire. Insofar as the Late Roman empire was nominally–very nominally–Christian, I suppose your point stands, but according to Bloch, the earliest manorial structures were the result of the dissolution of the larger, older empire into smaller pieces, many of which were beyond meaningful administrative control by Rome itself. Second, bishoprics and monasteries, the primary land holdings of the clergy, were of the same order as manors, so they fit within the overall feudal system, not parallel to it.
If Bloch is not right about this, I'm open to reading other sources, but that's what my understanding was based on. Moreover, the basic system of patronage and fealty that made the manor economy function certainly seems to have survived the historical phenomenon we call feudalism, and that parallel was what I was trying to draw attention to. Lord/vassal relationships are fundamentally contractual, not just quid pro quo but organized around favors and reputation, and maybe the analogy is a bit strained, but it does point to the ways in which modern white collar work especially is about more than fixed pay for a fixed sum of labor output.
Thure Meyer, November 4, 2015 at 7:30 am
Isn't this rather off-topic?
This is not a discussion about the true and correct history of European feudalism or whether or not it applies to the situation at hand, but a dialogue about Global fascism and how it expresses itself in this Nation.
HarrySnapperOrgans, November 4, 2015 at 4:46 am
I suspect that the similarity of medeavil fuedalism with the relationship between a large modern corporation and its employees is not properly appreciated because the latter, unlike the former, does not necessarily include direct control over living conditions (housing, land, rent), even though in the end there may be a similar degree of effective servitude (lack of mobility and alternatives, and so effective entrapment at low wages) .
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November 3, 2015 | nakedcapitalism.com
The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name. Confucius
One of the distressing things about politics in the US is the way words have either been stripped of their meaning or become so contested as to undermine the ability to communicate and analyze. It's hard to get to a conversation when you and your interlocutors don't have the same understanding of basic terms.
And that is no accident. The muddying of meaning is a neo-Orwellian device to influence perceptions by redefining core concepts. And a major vector has been by targeting narrow interest groups on their hot-button topics. Thus, if you are an evangelical or otherwise strongly opposed to women having reproductive control, anyone who favors womens' rights in this area is in your vein of thinking, to the left of you, hence a "liberal". Allowing the Overton Window to be framed around pet interests, as opposed to a view of what societal norms are, has allowed for the media to depict the center of the political spectrum as being well to the right of where it actually is as measured by decades of polling, particularly on economic issues.
Another way of limiting discourse is to relegate certain terms or ideas to what Daniel Hallin called the "sphere of deviance." Thus, until roughly two years ago, calling an idea "Marxist" in the US was tantamount to deeming it to be the political equivalent of taboo. That shows how powerful the long shadow of the Communist purges of the McCarthy era were, more than a generation after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Similarly, even as authoritarianism is rapidly rising in the US and citizens are losing their rights (see a reminder from last weekend, a major New York Times story on how widespread use of arbitration clauses is stripping citizens of access to the court system*), one runs the risk of having one's hair on fire if one dares suggest that America is moving in a fascist, or perhaps more accurately, a Mussolini-style corporatist direction. Yet we used that very expression, "Mussolini-style corporatism," to describe the the post-crisis bank bailouts. Former chief economist of the IMF, Simon Johnson, was more stark in his choice of terms, famously calling the rescues a "quiet coup" by financial oligarchs.
Now admittedly, the new neoliberal economic order is not a replay of fascism, so there is reason not to apply the "f" word wholesale. Nevertheless, there is a remarkable amount of inhibition in calling out the similarities where they exist. For instance, the article by Thom Hartmann below, which we've reposted from Alternet, is bold enough to use the "fascist" word in the opening paragraph (but not the headline!). But it then retreats from making a hard-headed analysis by focusing on warnings about the risks of fascism in America from the 1940s. While historical analysis is always enlightening, you'll see the article only selectively interjects contemporary examples. Readers no doubt can help fill out, as well as qualify, this picture.
By Thom Hartmann, an author and nationally syndicated daily talk show host. His newest book is "The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America -- and What We Can Do to Stop It." Originally published at Alternet
Ben Carson's feeble attempt to equate Hitler and pro-gun control Democrats was short-lived, but along with the announcement that Marco Rubio has brought in his second big supporting billionaire, it brings to mind the first American vice-president to point out the "American fascists" among us.
Although most Americans remember that Harry Truman was Franklin D. Roosevelt's vice-president when Roosevelt died in 1945 (making Truman president), Roosevelt had two previous vice-presidents: John N. Garner (1933-1941) and Henry A. Wallace (1941-1945).
In early 1944, the New York Times asked Vice-President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, "write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?"
Vice-President Wallace's answer to those questions was published in the New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan.
"The really dangerous American fascists," Wallace wrote, "are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information.
"With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power."
In this, Wallace was using the classic definition of the word "fascist" -- the definition Mussolini had in mind when he claimed to have invented the word. (It was actually Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile who wrote the entry in the Encyclopedia Italiana that said: "Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." Mussolini, however, affixed his name to the entry, and claimed credit for it.)
As the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is, "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."
Mussolini was quite straightforward about all this. In a 1923 pamphlet titled "The Doctrine of Fascism" he wrote, "If classical liberalism spells individualism, Fascism spells government." But not a government of, by, and for We The People; instead, it would be a government of, by, and for the most powerful corporate interests in the nation.
In 1938, Mussolini brought his vision of fascism into full reality when he dissolved Parliament and replaced it with the Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni -- the Chamber of the Fascist Corporations. Corporations were still privately owned, but now instead of having to sneak their money to folks like Tom DeLay and covertly write legislation, they were openly in charge of the government.
Vice-President Wallace bluntly laid out in his 1944 Times article his concern about the same happening here in America:
If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. … They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead.
Nonetheless, at that time there were few corporate heads who'd run for political office, and in Wallace's view, most politicians still felt it was their obligation to represent We The People instead of corporate cartels.
"American fascism will not be really dangerous," he added in the next paragraph, "until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information…."
Noting that, "Fascism is a worldwide disease," Wallace further suggest that fascism's "greatest threat to the United States will come after the war" and will manifest "within the United States itself."
In Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel It Can't Happen Here a conservative southern politician is helped to the presidency by a nationally syndicated radio talk show host. The politician, Buzz Windrip, runs his campaign on family values, the flag and patriotism. Windrip and the talk show host portray advocates of traditional American democracy as anti-American.
When Windrip becomes president, he opens a Guantanamo-style detention center, and the viewpoint character of the book, Vermont newspaper editor Doremus Jessup, flees to Canada to avoid prosecution under new "patriotic" laws that make it illegal to criticize the President.
As Lewis noted in his novel, "the President, with something of his former good-humor [said]: 'There are two [political] parties, the Corporate and those who don't belong to any party at all, and so, to use a common phrase, are just out of luck!' The idea of the Corporate or Corporative State, Secretary [of State] Sarason had more or less taken from Italy."
And, President "Windrip's partisans called themselves the Corporatists, or, familiarly, the 'Corpos,' which nickname was generally used."
Lewis, the first American writer to win a Nobel Prize, was world famous by 1944, as was his book. And several well-known and powerful Americans, including Prescott Bush, had lost businesses in the early 1940s because of charges by Roosevelt that they were doing business with Hitler.
These events all, no doubt, colored Vice-President Wallace's thinking when he wrote:
Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion. American fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they left off, after 'the present unpleasantness' ceases.
Fascists have an agenda that is primarily economic. As the Free Dictionary (www.thefreedictionary.com) notes, fascism/corporatism is "an attempt to create a 'modern' version of feudalism by merging the 'corporate' interests with those of the state."
Feudalism, of course, is one of the most stable of the three historic tyrannies (kingdoms, theocracies, feudalism) that ruled nations prior to the rise of American republican democracy, and can be roughly defined as "rule by the rich."
Thus, the neo-feudal/fascistic rich get richer (and more powerful) on the backs of the poor and the middle class, an irony not lost on author Thomas Frank, who notes in his book What's The Matter With Kansas that, "You can see the paradox first-hand on nearly any Main Street in middle America -- 'going out of business' signs side by side with placards supporting George W. Bush."
The businesses "going out of business" are, in fascist administrations, usually those of locally owned small and medium-sized companies. As Wallace wrote, some in big business "are willing to jeopardize the structure of American liberty to gain some temporary advantage."
He added:
Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise [companies]. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself.
But American fascists who would want former CEOs as president, vice-president, House Majority Whip, and Senate Majority Leader, and write legislation with corporate interests in mind, don't generally talk to We The People about their real agenda, or the harm it does to small businesses and working people.
Instead, as Hitler did with the trade union leaders and the Jews, they point to a "them" to pin with blame and distract people from the harms of their economic policies.
In a comment prescient of Alabama's recent closing of every drivers' license office in every Alabama county with more than 75% black residents (while recently passing a law requiring a drivers' license or similar ID to vote), Wallace continued:
The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination…
But even at this, Wallace noted, American fascists would have to lie to the people in order to gain power. And, because they were in bed with the nation's largest corporations – who could gain control of newspapers and broadcast media -- they could promote their lies with ease.
"The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact," Wallace wrote. "Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy."
In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism, the vice-president of the United States saw rising in America, he added:
They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.
This liberal vision of an egalitarian America in which very large businesses and media monopolies are broken up under the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act (which Reagan stopped enforcing, leading to the mergers & acquisitions frenzy that continues to this day) was the driving vision of the New Deal (and of "Trust Buster" Teddy Roosevelt a generation earlier).
As Wallace's president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, said when he accepted his party's renomination in 1936 in Philadelphia, "…out of this modern civilization, economic royalists [have] carved new dynasties…. It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction…. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man…."
Speaking indirectly of the fascists Wallace would directly name almost a decade later, Roosevelt brought the issue to its core:
These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power." But, he thundered, "Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!
In the election of 2016, we again stand at the same crossroad Roosevelt and Wallace confronted during the Great Depression and World War II.
Fascism is again rising in America, this time calling itself "conservativism." The Republican candidates' and their billionaire donors' behavior today eerily parallels that day in 1936 when Roosevelt said, "In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for."
It's particularly ironic that the "big news" is which billionaire is supporting which Republican candidate. Like Eisenhower's farewell address, President Roosevelt and Vice-President Wallace's warnings are more urgent now than ever before.
_____
* In trying to find the New York Times story again, I simply Googled "arbitration," on the assumption that given that the article was both high traffic and recent that it would come up high in a search. Not only did the story not come up on the first page, although a reference to it in Consumerist did, but when I clicked on "in the news" link, it was again not in the first page in Google. If this isn't censorship, I don't know what is. The story was widely referenced on the Web and got far more traffic than the "news" story that Google gave preference (such as, of all things, a Cato study and "Arbitration Eligible BrewersBrew Crew Ball-19 hours ago"). In fact, the NYT article does not appear on the first five pages of the Google news search, even though older and clearly lower traffic stories do. And when you find the first reference to the story on the news page, which is a Cato piece mentioning it, and you click through to the "explore in depth" page, again the New York Times story is not the prominent placement it warrants, and is listed fifth. Consider how many clicks it took to find it.
Crazy Horse, November 3, 2015 at 10:49 amAmen -- I've always detested the weasel words "neoliberal" and "neoconservative". Lets just be honest enough to call ideologies and political behaviors by their proper name.
timbers, November 3, 2015 at 11:17 am
I agree!
Telling my friends Obama is "neoliberal" means nothing to 99% of them, they couldn't care less, it does not compute. So instead I tell them Obama is the most right wing President in history who's every bit un-hinged as Sarah Palin and at least as bat shit insame as John McCain, but you think that's totally OK because you're a Dem and Dems think that because Obama speaks with better grammar than Sarah Palin and is more temperate than John McCain. Them I tell them to vote Green instead of the utlra right wing Dems
Call Dems what they are – corrupt right wingers, ultra conservatives.
Barmitt O'Bamney, November 3, 2015 at 11:01 am
LOL. You get to take your pick between TWO fascist parties in 2016. Just like you did for the last several elections. I wonder if the outcome will be different this time – will Fascism grab the prize again, or will it be Fascism coming out ahead at the last minute to save the day?
David, November 3, 2015 at 11:04 am
washunate November 3, 2015 at 11:28 amWhy didn't Wallace become President when Roosevelt died? From the St. Petersburg Times,
The Gallup Poll said 65 percent of the voting Democrats wanted Wallace and that 2 percent wanted Senator Truman. But the party bosses could not boss Wallace. They made a coalition with the Roosevelt-haters and skillfully and cynically mowed down the unorganized Wallace forces.
Take note Bernie fans.
With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power
Such a concise and cogent explanation. The go-to policy advice of the fascist is to do moar of whatever he's selling.
susan the other November 3, 2015 at 12:18 pm
I was just going to say something like this too. There is a logical end to fascism and if it is blocked and prolonged then when it finally runs its course it ends in a huge mess. And even the fascists don't know what to do. Because everything they were doing becomes pure poison. Moar money and power have an Achilles Heel – there is an actual limit to their usefulness. So this is where we find ourselves today imo – not at the beginning of a fascist-feudal empire, but at the bitter and confused end. Our implosion took far longer than Germany's, but the writing was on the wall from 1970 on. And then toss in the wages of prolonged sin – neoliberalism's excesses, the planet, global warming.
TarheelDem November 3, 2015 at 1:02 pm
Yes. This.
One would think that Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and the killing of 1000 people by cops would be a clue. As would an understanding of the counter-New Deal that began to unfold in 1944, gained power in 1946, and institutionalized itself as a military and secret government in 1947. Or the rush to war after every peace, the rush to debt after every surplus, and perpetual inability of the IRS to collect taxes from the wealthiest.
Maybe not even a Franco-level fascist state or a fascist state with a single dictator, more like the state capitalism of the Soviet Union and current China without the public infrastructure. Just the oligarchs.
And yet it is in a state of failure, and inability to do anything but feather then nests of those who rule, all those King Midases.
participant-observer-observed November 3, 2015 at 1:49 pm
Also, the increase of censorship (GMO labels or fracking chemicals), and persecution of whistleblowers and political prisoners, incarceration of whole swathes of black population, along w execution w no due process, continuous wars abroad w no apparent tbreat to domestic security and the state of the nation is apparent.
participant-observer-observed November 3, 2015 at 2:56 pm
Whoops, almost forgot to include: mass surveillance.
Jim November 3, 2015 at 3:27 pm
Isn't it important to keep in mind that fascism, as it developed in Italy and Germany, were authentic mass based movements generating great popular enthusiasm and not merely a clever manipulation of of populist emotions by the reactionary Right or by capitalism in crisis.
The orthodox left made this mistake in the 1920s and early 1930s and in 2015 still appears wedded to this erroneous assumption.
washunate November 3, 2015 at 8:17 pm
Authentic augmented by the generous application of force, I'd say. That I think is a very interesting discussion about just how freely fascism develops. I don't think Italy and especially Germany developed with a particularly genuine popular enthusiasm. Very early on, the national socialists were arresting internal political opposition through parallel courts with explicit references to things like state security. Dachau, for example, was originally for German political prisoners. Jews and foreign nationals came later.
And of course there's the ultimate in false flags, the Reichstag Fire Decree. The whole point of that and the Enabling Act was to circumvent the checks and balances of democratic governance; Hitler himself certainly did not trust the German people to maintain the power he wanted of their own accord and discernment.
Or to put it differently, I'd say the appearance of popular enthusiasm from a mass movement was the result of fascist control as much as the cause. That's what's so unnverving about the American context of 21st century fascism. It does not require a mass movement to implement this kind of totalitarianism. It merely requires the professional class to keep their heads down long enough for a critical mass to be reached by the power structure in hollowing out the back-office guts of democratic governance.
Ishmael November 3, 2015 at 8:47 pm
Fascism was a counter revolution to Bolshevikism. The upper and upper-middle class was scared to death of what happen in Russia under Bolshevikism. They united with the military looking for someone to counter Bolshevikism and settled on Hitler and the Nazi's. The military thought they control him but they ended up being wrong.
You have to understand that after WW1 the allies kept a sea blockade on Germany and that resulted in over a million Germans starving to death. Then came depression followed by hyperinflation. Then there was the fear of Bolsheviks. The Nazi's showed up and things started working again. The Bolsheviks were driven from the street. The Nazi's started borrowing tons of money (yes they issued bonds) and started work programs. The economy started recovering. People had work and food and soon the Nazi's were furnishing free health care. After you had gone through hell this was heaven.
MathandPhysics November 3, 2015 at 10:18 pm
It's strange but 9/11 and the 3 steel frame buildings collapse into dust in few seconds isn't recognized by the masses as false flag Hitler style, then what do you expect ? Massmedia did what it could to confuse them all, only math and physics can help you to see the truth.
Jim November 3, 2015 at 11:23 pm
It would, indeed, be an extremely worthwhile discussion to analyze how freely fascism developed in Italy and Germany.
As a first step in that directkion, Washunate, you might take a look at studies like "Elections, Parties, and Political Traditions: Social Foundations of German parties and party systems.
In the July 1932 elections the SPD (Socialist Party) received 21.6 percent of the vote and was replaced by the NSDAP (Nazi party) as the countries largest political party (with 37.3% of the vote). with the KPD (the communists) capturing 14.5%of the vote.
It was at that time that the Nazi party become a true "people's party" with a support base that was more equally distributed among social and demographic categories than any other major party of the Weimar republic.
Tone November 3, 2015 at 11:42 am
The thing that troubles me most is that there are no leaders like Roosevelt or Wallace today. Where are the POPULAR politicians (Roosevelt was elected 4 times!) calling it like it is and publicly refuting conservative/fascist dogma? Sanders? Maybe. But he's trailing Clinton and certainly he's not a force in the Democratic party like Roosevelt was. At least not yet.
I agree with the "quiet coup" assessment, and I keep waiting for the next Roosevelt, the next Lincoln, the next Founding Father, to appear on the political stage and fight the battle against corporatist/fascist forces. Sadly, it hasn't happened yet.
Masonboro November 3, 2015 at 11:50 am
Unfortunately the next Founding Father to appear (or has appeared) will be John Jay (first Chief Justice among other roles) who was quoted as having said :
"Those who own America should govern it"
Jim
TarheelDem November 3, 2015 at 1:07 pm
Hank Paulson and George W. Bush prevented the situation in 2008 from forcing a Rooseveltian Congress. And the Congress went along with them. Then it was so easy for the do-nothings to argue for less and continue the austerity. And as in Roosevelt's era, racism helped prevent full change, which allowed the post-war rollback.
participant-observer-observed November 3, 2015 at 1:52 pm
Even among the corporatists in govt or business, there are no distinctive shining exemplars of leadership or competence !
Massinissa November 3, 2015 at 2:12 pm
Founding fathers?
Who do you think put the basis of rule by the rich into practice in the first place? A series of 'popular movements' like Shays Rebellion was what forced the founding fathers to make voting rights not dependent on owning land, not because the Founding Fathers were really nice people who luvved 'Democracy'.
Oregoncharles November 4, 2015 at 1:57 am
We just might have to be that "leader" ourselves.
Masonboro November 3, 2015 at 11:46 am
"on the rise" or firmly entrenched ? We already have Homeland Security, Justice Thomas, Donald Trump ,Ted Cruz, and the Koch Brothers (who are running ads in NC extolling recently passed changes in the tax code to continue shifting from income to consumption taxes). What is missing?
Jim
susan the other November 3, 2015 at 12:32 pm
I always think of the Kochs when the word fascist is used. They are ostensibly great environmentalists. Never mind that they operate some of the filthiest industries on the planet. They sponsor NOVA; one brother is a raving environmentalist (that's fine with me) and the other two tone it down. But their brand of conservative politix is as pointless as it is ignorant. That's an interesting topic – the hypocrisy of rich corporatist environmentalists. They are living a contradiction that will tear them apart. But at least they are agonizing over the problem.
lou strong November 3, 2015 at 11:56 am
Maybe my English is too bad, but it seems there's a misunderstanding about "corporatism" meaning, which is unfortunately reflected, as it seems again, in some American dictionaries. Corporation in Italian has approximately the meaning of guild and has nothing to do with big enterprises.
So, while there is no doubt that fascists took power in Italy as the armed wing of big capital, big finance and big landholders against the unrests of the low classes, the idea of corporatist state for them meant the refusal of the principle of class war in favor of the principle of class (guilds, "corporations" :both for employers and employees/trade unions) collaboration , and all of them as subservients to the superior interest of the state.Fascism agenda wasn't primarily economic. There wasn't either a specific agenda : until '29 the regime acted as deeply "neoliberal" with privatizations, deflationary policies to fix a strong lira smashing labor rights and purchase power etc etc , after the crisis it nationalized the failed enterprises and introduced some welfare state elements.
So at least the regime got the property of the failed banks/enterprises, much unlike current situation , where we see the mere socialization of losses and privatization of profits .
Massinissa November 3, 2015 at 2:23 pm
You are correct, I have read this before.
But English speakers either dont know or dont care. Ive seen people talk about "Mussolini Corporatism" like this for what, five years, and they never get corrected.
I dont think theres anything we can do to get people to stop using that term as if it means what they think it means.
visitor November 3, 2015 at 3:19 pm
Massinissa and lou strong are correct -- corporatism in Mussolini's Italy meant structuring the State and the legislative body around organizations representing specific professional or economic sectors.
By the way: we should not forget another fascist State, Portugal, which during the entire Salazar regime officially defined itself as a "corporatist republic".
Barmitt O'Bamney November 3, 2015 at 4:21 pm
You can direct them to the Wikipedia entry for corporatism, which is extensive, or to Michael Lind's 2014 article on the multiple historical meanings and recent misuse of this term. But the term has currency and traction today for reason neither article quite puts a finger on. Under Italian Fascism, the traditional meanings of corporative representation and bargaining were invoked but fused tightly under the auspices -or control- of the nation state, which of course was a single party state. The theoretical representativeness of corporatism was as a facade for political control of all institutions of Italian life by the Fascist Party. In the present time, with unions and guilds a fading memory, regions homogenized and classes atomized, with churches that are little more than money making enterprises as transparent as any multilevel marketing scheme, there are few non-government institutions in western life with any weight besides for-profit corporations. When people struggle to describe what seems wrong to them with our political life, the subservience of our government – and therefore everything else – to profit seeking corporations, they need a term that reflects neatly what has happened and where we are. Democracy of course is defunct both as a term and in reality. We don't have a state of decayed democracy (passive, negative), we have a state of corporate diktat (active, positive). "Corporatism" is an attractive and convenient verbal handle for the masses to latch onto, no matter how much this disappoints the learned. In English, when enough people "misuse" a term for a sufficiently long time, what happens is that the OED adds a new sub-entry for it reflecting its current usage.
Vatch November 3, 2015 at 4:46 pm
I've tried to correct people's misunderstanding of corporazione, but it's probably a losing battle:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/03/neo-liberalism-expressed-simple-rules.html#comment-1919832
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/05/tpp-fascism-issue.html#comment-2439813
run75441 November 4, 2015 at 7:47 am
Try "corpocracy"
Les Swift November 3, 2015 at 12:09 pm
Corporatism is indeed an old idea, feudalism re-branded as "fascism." After Hitler ruined the term, fascism remained, but underground, until it reemerged in the 1960s as what George Ball termed the "world company," which is better known as the system of global corporations. The same general idea, but under a new marketing slogan. Today we have globalization, the raft of "trade" treaties, the Austrian/Libertarian ideology, all of which ultimately push the world toward yet another replay of feudalism. The box says "new and improved," but inside it's the same old crap.
kevinearick November 3, 2015 at 1:01 pm
Clone Dreams
"The more people that transact with one another, the greater the division of labour and knowledge, the greater the ability to develop comparative advantage and the greater the productivity gains."
What could possibly go wrong?
In any empire, virtual or otherwise, you are always surrounded by communist thieves that think they are going to control your output with a competitive advantage illusion, which conveniently ignores opportunity cost. Government is just a derivative piece of paper, the latest fashion for communists, all assuming that the planet is here for their convenience, to exploit. Well, the critters have blown right through 45/5000/.75, and Canada was supposed to be the proving ground for the Silicon Valley Method. Now what?
"Don't panic : world trade is down….Don't bet against the Fed….BTFD." Expect something other than demographic variability, financial implosion, and war.
The communists are always running head first over the cliff, expecting you to follow. Labor has no use for cars that determine when, where and how you will travel, and the communists can't fix anything, because the 'fix' is already inside, embedded as a feature. America is just the latest communist gang believing it has commandeered the steamroller, rolling over other communist gangs.
The Bear isn't coming down from the North, China isn't selling Treasuries, and families are not moving away from the city by accident. Only the latest and greatest, new-world-order communists, replacing themselves with computers, are surprised that technology is always the solution for the problem, technology. Facebook, LinkedIn and Google are only the future for communists, which is always the same, a dead end, with a different name.
Remember that Honda of mine? I told the head communist thief not to touch that car while I was gone, told his fellow thieves and their dependents that I told him so, and even gave him the advantage of telling him what the problem was. How many hours do you suppose the fools spent trying to control that car, and my wife with it?
I don't care whether the communists on the other side of the hill or the communists on this side of the hill think they are going to control Grace, and through her my wife, and through her me. And there are all kinds of communist groups using pieces of my work to advance their AI weapons development, on the assumption that my work will not find itself in the end. Grace will decide whether she wants to be an individual or a communist.
The only way the communists can predict and control the future is to control children. That's what financialization is all about. And all communism can do is train automatons to follow each other, which is a problem-solution addressed by the planet every three generations. You don't have to do anything for communism to collapse, but get out of the way.
Technology is just a temporary tool, discarded by labor for the communists to steal, and stealing a hammer doesn't make anyone a carpenter, much less a King, which is why the Queen always walks through the wreckage, to a worthless throne. The story of Jesus was in fact the story of a king, who had no use for a worldly kingdom, other than as a counterweight, always surrounded by communists, like pigs at a trough. Jesus was no more and no less a child of God than you are.
Labor loses every battle because it doesn't participate, leaving the communists to label each other as labour and knowledge. And if you look, you will see that all their knowledge is real estate inflation, baked into everything, with oil as grease. The name, Robert Reich, didn't give you a hint; of course he knew all along, and like a good communist, changes sides on a regular basis.
You can't pick your parents or your children, or make choices for them, but you can love them without pissing your life away. Navy hasn't disappeared just because the US Navy chose to be a sunk cost, at the beck and call of Wall Street, trying to defend the status quo of communism, for communists on the other side of the pond. A marine is not always a Marine, and a flattop can be turned on a dime.
"The Muses doe attend upon your Throne, With all the Artists at your becke and call…"
If you want to show up at WWIII with a communist and a dc computer as a weapon, that's your business, but I wouldn't recommend doing so. Labor can mobilize far quicker than the communists can imagine, which isn't saying much. Be about your business until the laws of physics have been overthrown, and that hasn't happened yet.
You can count on communists to be at an intersection, creating a traffic jam, building a bigger toll booth, and voting for more of the same, thinking that they are taking advantage of each other, doing the wrong thing at the wrong time at the wrong place. Any intersection of false assumptions will do.
alex morfesis November 3, 2015 at 1:12 pm
let the merry breezes blow synthetic winds…
his name was hanz…or so I was told…we had acquired a lease from the NYC HPD from a parking lot/marina that was at the very north edge of Harlem River Drive at Dyckman (pronounced dikeman)….there is a school there now…he "came" with the lease…years later I would find out he was working with Carlos Lehder and helping arrange for cash payments to conveniently amnesiastic police officers who used the hardly functioning marina to go fishing…in the east river & the hudson…go figure…the more I tried to get rid of him…the more "problems" occurred…my father begged me stop poking around and just "leave it alone"…I don't think he ever really knew what "hanz" was doing or who he was…oh well…might explain how we lost a billion dollars in real estate (ok…it was not worth a billion back then…but it had not debt other than real estate taxes…it was not lost for simply economic reasons)
we as a nation were "convinced" to allow 50 thousand former nazis to enter this country after ww2…under the foolish notion that "the russians" (who have never killed too many americans if my history serves me right) were a "new danger" and only the folks who LO$T to the russians had the knowledge needed to save us from those "evil communists"…(evil communists who helped the Koch Family make their financial start…details details…)
those nazis, from my research have probably grown to a force of about 250 thousand who are the basic clowns (MIC…see you real soon…KEY…why, because we like you…) Ike was talking about in January of 1961…
but…as Ike mentioned when talking about the Koch dad and his John Birch nonsense…they are small and they are stupid…
the use of "coup" in the context of some of the strange happenings in our history these last 55 years is probably not a reasonable term…
I would say we have had "coupettes" where certain groups threatened MAD if they did not get their way or were not left alone…and then those wimps in power decided…better you than me…and turned a blind eye for 30 pieces of silver…coincidence and causality sometimes are not just mathematical anomalies…
there is no need to "take back" our country…it is ours and has always been ours…the reason "the clowns that be" worry so much is that for all the use of bernaze sause…they can hardly fake half the population into showing up to vote on "one of the chosen ones"…and that 50% that are not fully mesmerized are the fear factor for the clowns that be…
remember…try as "they" might…can "they" keep you watching the same tv show for ever…or get you to buy their useless "branded" product without coupons or advertising…
it is not as bad or scary as they would like you to believe…they would not be working this hard if they were comfortable in their socks…they do not sleep well at night…you are the "zombie apocalypse" they are afraid off…
pass the popcorn please…
and may our freedom
"bloom again" at "the end of the century"
(or sooner…)
happy trails…
Les Swift November 3, 2015 at 1:24 pm
Huh? Many of the things you brand as "communist" existed long before Communism was created. To blame it all on "communists" is a serious error which blinds you to much older evils, some of which Communism was at least nominally intended to correct. It is important to recognize that the "Red scares" have been used by forces in the West to bolster their own power. One can both disagree with Communism and disagree with the "Red menace" propaganda at the same time. The people who scare you with the threat of Communism are more of a threat than the Communists themselves.
kevinearick November 3, 2015 at 1:33 pm
Funny thing about words…under the law, they mean whatever the author intends them to mean.
kevinearick November 3, 2015 at 1:50 pm
not a big believer in evil, just stupid, willful ignorance, aggregated.
Gio Bruno November 3, 2015 at 10:37 pm
GWBush is evil and stupid. Dick Cheney is evil, stupid, and ignorant, aggregated.
Doug November 3, 2015 at 1:58 pm
Time to re-read The Moneysburg Address:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/07/the-moneysburg-address.html
Jim November 3, 2015 at 2:32 pm
When talking about the rise of fascism(especially if the US experiences another economic/financial meltdown in the next few years) it is so important to get the historical context as accurate as possible.
Mussolini began his political career as an exponent of a different type of socialism. One of his early followers was Antonio Gramsci and they both deplored the passivity of orthodox Marxists.
Mussolini was attracted to the theoretical framework of Sorel to offset traditional left passivity and the syndicalist focus on the importance of human will. He founded a journal in 1913 called Utopia and called for a revision of socialism in which he began referring to "the people" and not the proletariat, as well as stressing the importance of the nation. He attempted to bring nationalist and syndicalist streams of thought together.
After World War I Mussolini helped found a new political movement in Italy which brought together both nationalist and socialist themes. Its first program was anticapitalist, antimonarchical and called for an 8 hour day, minimum wages, the participation of workers' representatives in industrial management and a large progressive tax on capital.
By the early 1920s the Fasci of Mussolini gained a powerful base of support in rural Italian areas, advocating of program of peasant proprtietorship rather than endorsing the calls for the nationalization of property of the orthodox left.
By this time fascism presented itself as an opponent of "Bolshevism" and a guardian of private property while emphasizing the collective good and criticizing absentee landlords and "exploitative capitalists"
For an excellent discussion of the development of these ideas as well as the concrete steps toward corporatism that took place after 1922 see Sheri Berman "The Primacy of Politics"
A key point to keep in mind was that the fascism that eventually developed in Italy was willing to assert unconditionally the power of the state over the market.
participant-observer-observed November 3, 2015 at 2:37 pm
Relevant postbocer at Counterpunch too:
Not everybody just "wants what we have," as the common view here has it. In fact, from Bolivia, where the average person consumes perhaps 1/20th the total resources of her analogue in the US, comes the old-new idea of buen vivir (the good life): a life in which the health of your human community and its surrounding ecosystem are more important than the amount of money you make or things you own.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/03/the-browning-of-the-world-blame-the-greed-of-the-rich/
Jacob November 3, 2015 at 3:16 pm
"In this, Wallace was using the classic definition of the word fascist' -- the definition Mussolini had in mind when he claimed to have invented the word."
An Italian Jew by the name of Enrico Rocca is cited in "Roots of Hate: Anti-Semitism in Europe Before the Holocaust" as the founder of Roman fascism. This name is completely unknown in the U.S. A large number of Italian Jews were founders and members of the Italian fascist party prior to 1938 when anti-Semitism became official. "Among Mussolini's earliest financial backers were three Jews: Giuseppe Toeplitz of the Banca Commerciale Italiana, Elio Jona [?], and the industrialist Gino Olivetti. . . ." The banker Toeplitz was the main financier behind Mussolini's blackshirts, which served as union busters for big business and land owners (also see "Fascism and Big Business" by Daniel Guerin). Undermining organized labor in order to drive down wages was a central aim of fascism in Italy and later under Hitler in Germany. In 1933, roughly ten percent of Italian Jews were members of the fascist party. These facts are important to know because moderns are led to believe that fascism is inherently anti-semitic, but that wasn't the case in the early years of fascism in Italy, where it was founded.
Jim November 3, 2015 at 3:58 pm
It is also important to keep in mind, as Sheri Berman has argued, that social democracy, the fascism of Mussolini and National Socialism in Germany agree on a set of key assumptions.
1. All assume the primary importance of politics and cross-class cooperation. Edward Bermstein at the turn of the 20th century began attacking the main pillars of orthodox Marxism, historical materialism and class struggle while arguing for an alternative vision based on state control of markets–social democracy became the complete severing of socialism from Marxism.
2. For these same Social Democrats the primacy of the political meant using the democratic state to institutionalize policies and protect society from capitalism.
3. For fascists and national socialists using a tyrannical state to control markets was supposedly necessary–but, of course, this postion deteriorated into moves to ensure the hegemony of the modern State.
But is it the case, in 2015, taken the power of our contemporary Surveillance regime, that a democratic state still exists?
Do contemporary democratic socialists first have to first focus on how to restore democracy in the U.S. rather than assuming that the contemporary political structure just needs the right leadership–someone like Bernie Sanders–and the right credit policy– such as MMT?
hemeantwell November 3, 2015 at 4:31 pm
Hartmann draws from Mussolini the idea that the fascist state prioritizes and organizes corporate interests, but misses what Mussolini left out of his harmonistic definition, which was that in both Germany and Italy organized terror was to be used to destroy opposition to corporate interests. The systematic use of terror had major implications for the way the internal politics of the fascist state developed, for the weight given in its organizational structure and tactical options to the elimination of internal enemies. Along with this, both political orders were infused with a leadership ethos that, particularly in Nazi Germany, could attain strikingly absolute forms, demanding absolute obedience and sacrifice. This encouraged a strong tendency to subordinate any institution that might serve as a point of coalescence to interests opposed to the regime. The Fuhrer's picture had to be both on your wall and in your heart.
Hartmann misses this political knife edge of fascism and the leadership fascination that supports it. It is not wildly speculative to say that this is largely because the domestic enemies against which it was directed, primarily leftist trade unions, are not a threat in the US. No such organizations need to be wrecked, no such memberships need to be decimated, imprisoned, and dispersed. It is simply astonishing that Hartmann says nothing specifically about labor organizations as the prime instigating target of both fascists and the corporations who supported them. In this respect his analysis unwittingly incorporates the ideological suppression of the labor movement that mirrored the fascist onslaught.
It is also telling that although Hartmann references Wallace and Roosevelt he fails to note that they themselves have also been accused of corporatism, albeit one that involved the imposition of a Keynesian, welfarist orientation to capitalist interests that were, at least in some quarters, inclined to "liquidate, liquidate" their way into a revolution against themselves. Instead, he quotes Wallace and Roosevelt as they render fascism as a kind of power-hungry, antidemocratic urge on the part of some "royalists," thereby blurring out how the central issue was how to manage labor. He misses that Roosevelt offered the state as an organizer of conflict between capital and labor within a framework in which labor was guaranteed bargaining status. Roosevelt was thereby moved to attack capitalists who wanted to deny labor that status and risk both devastating hardship and insurrection. Hartmann falls for Roosevelt's broad democratic rhetoric against them, more exhortation than analysis, and so he himself ends up talking ethereally of threats to "freedom" and "American institutions."
We're not living under fascism and Hartmann, whose criticism is often very useful, is wrong in trying to use the term as a rallying orientation. I agree that the social order is corporatist, but its maintenance has not required the kind of direct oppression + totalitarian/personalized leadership cult that is a marker of fascism. Concepts the Frankfurt School have used such as "total administration" and the like are perhaps too anodyne, not to mention absolute in their own way, but they fit better with a situation in which explicit violence does not have to be generalized.
Robert Paxton's "The Anatomy of Fascism" is a useful backgrounder on this.
Jim November 3, 2015 at 6:30 pm
Heamtwell stated directly above that " We're not living under fascism…"
Some concepts/ questions which may begin to get at our potential propensity for moving in that direction might include the following:
Paxton, mentioned by Heamtwell above, isolated five stages of fascism.
(1) the initial creation of fascist movements
(2) their rooting as parties in a political system
(3) the acquisition of power
(4) the exercise of power
(5) their radicalization or entropyPaxton has argued that Fascism can appear where democracy is sufficiently implanted to have aroused disillusion–a society must have known political liberty.
In regards to Paxtons first 2 stages and our situation in the US.
Are political fascists becoming rooted in political parties that represent major interests and feelings and wield major influence on our political scene?
Is our constitutional system in a state of blockage increasingly insoluble by existing authorities?
Is rapid political mobilization taking place in our society which threatens to escape the control of traditional elites to the point where they would be tempted to look for tough helpers in order to stay in charge?
hemeantwell November 3, 2015 at 7:16 pm
Is rapid political mobilization taking place in our society which threatens to escape the control of traditional elites to the point where they would be tempted to look for tough helpers in order to stay in charge?
I think that's the primary question, and it helps to define what we're facing with the current party system.
It is apparent that both corporate parties are increasingly incapable of properly deflecting and channeling the interests of the electorate. Whether you think of 2007-08 as simply another business cycle, one that was exacerbated by toxic assets, a product of increasing income and wealth disparity, etc. it seems that portions of the electorate have been shocked out of their confidence in the system and the steering capacity of economic and political elites.
This might lead the parties, under the pressure of events, to might reformulate themselves as the political cover of a "government of national unity" that, depending on the extremity of the next downturn, impose a "solidarity from above," blocking the development of popular organizations in a variety of ways. I certainly see this as possible. But treating the parties, or the system itself, as fascist at this point in time is not only not helpful, it is fundamentally disorienting.
Ron November 3, 2015 at 8:05 pm
F* is an ugly word as is all its close relatives, but your definitions are very interesting, and so maybe I've learned some things by reading them. However; by what contrivance did you manage to get any of these pages past the f* who own the internet? It seems I must suspend my disbelief to believe, Freunde von Grund
todde November 3, 2015 at 8:20 pm
I disagree.
In Fascism, corporations were subservient to the State. What we have is the State subservient to Corporations. Also Italian corporatism was more than just business, as a.corporation in Italy can have.non business functions.
tommy strange November 3, 2015 at 8:23 pm
Great post and great comments. Though I wonder why no one has brought up the only way to stop fascism. A militant class based libertarian left. Outside of the ballot box. If a liberal party still 'exists' they will then at least respond to the larger non party real left, just to nullify it's demands. Fascism has never been defeated by the ballot, only by a militant anarchist/socialist left. Or at the least, that 'left' fought back. Liberals rarely have fought back, and most often conceded. How do you do form such? Urban face to face organizing. With direct action and occupation and even organization towards workers' control of manufacturing.
Ishmael November 3, 2015 at 8:53 pm
tommy -Fascism has never been defeated by the ballot, only by a militant anarchist/socialist left.
I believe you should go re-look at history. Fascism has always defeated socialist left. Three examples -- Italy, Germany and Argentina. I welcome an example other wise and if it did how did it end.
visitor November 4, 2015 at 10:57 am
The paramount example is of course Spain, where all left-wing movements (communists, trotskists, anarchists, socialists) were ultimately defeated by fascists despite ferocious fighting.
Synoia November 3, 2015 at 9:48 pm
Mussolini-Style Corporatism, aka Fascism, on the
RiseWell Established in the USSet to Dominate World after TPP, TTIP and TISA ratified.
Keynesian November 3, 2015 at 11:03 pm
Much of Robert Paxton's work has focused on models and definition of fascism.
In his 1998 paper "The Five Stages of Fascism", he suggests that fascism cannot be defined solely by its ideology, since fascism is a complex political phenomenon rather than a relatively coherent body of doctrine like communism or socialism. Instead, he focuses on fascism's political context and functional development. The article identifies five paradigmatic stages of a fascist movement, although he notes that only Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy have progressed through all five:
1.Intellectual exploration, where disillusionment with popular democracy manifests itself in discussions of lost national vigor
2.Rooting, where a fascist movement, aided by political deadlock and polarization, becomes a player on the national stage
3.Arrival to power, where conservatives seeking to control rising leftist opposition invite the movement to share power
4.Exercise of power, where the movement and its charismatic leader control the state in balance with state institutions such as the police and traditional elites such as the clergy and business magnates.
5.Radicalization or entropy, where the state either becomes increasingly radical, as did Nazi Germany, or slips into traditional authoritarian rule, as did Fascist Italy.[4]In his 2004 book The Anatomy of Fascism, Paxton refines his five-stage model and puts forward the following definition for fascism:
[quote]Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.[5][/quote]
Here is a more contemporary analysis of politics in America using Paxton's model.
[quote]Fascist America: Are We There Yet?
Friday, August 07, 2009 -- by SaraIn the second stage, fascist movements take root, turn into real political parties, and seize their seat at the table of power. Interestingly, in every case Paxton cites, the political base came from the rural, less-educated parts of the country; and almost all of them came to power very specifically by offering themselves as informal goon squads organized to intimidate farmworkers on behalf of the large landowners. The KKK disenfranchised black sharecroppers and set itself up as the enforcement wing of Jim Crow. The Italian Squadristi and the German Brownshirts made their bones breaking up farmers' strikes. And these days, GOP-sanctioned anti-immigrant groups make life hell for Hispanic agricultural workers in the US. As violence against random Hispanics (citizens and otherwise) increases, the right-wing goon squads are getting basic training that, if the pattern holds, they may eventually use to intimidate the rest of us.
Paxton wrote that succeeding at the second stage "depends on certain relatively precise conditions: the weakness of a liberal state, whose inadequacies condemn the nation to disorder, decline, or humiliation; and political deadlock because the Right, the heir to power but unable to continue to wield it alone, refuses to accept a growing Left as a legitimate governing partner." He further noted that Hitler and Mussolini both took power under these same circumstances: "deadlock of constitutional government (produced in part by the polarization that the fascists abetted); conservative leaders who felt threatened by the loss of their capacity to keep the population under control at a moment of massive popular mobilization; an advancing Left; and conservative leaders who refused to work with that Left and who felt unable to continue to govern against the Left without further reinforcement."
And more ominously: "The most important variables…are the conservative elites' willingness to work with the fascists (along with a reciprocal flexibility on the part of the fascist leaders) and the depth of the crisis that induces them to cooperate."[/quote]
hermes November 4, 2015 at 12:10 am
I think there is something missing from this analysis, having to do with the definition of corporatism itself. I think our contemporary definition of corporatism is rooted in neoliberalism and is actually a far cry from the definition used by the Fascists in forming the Chamber of the Fascist Corporations. Because to them corporatism wasn't simply business interests (which is how we know it today), but (from Wikipedia):
'[was] the sociopolitical organization of a society by major interest groups, or corporate groups, such as agricultural, business, ethnic, labour, military, patronage, or scientific affiliations, on the basis of common interests. It is theoretically based on the interpretation of a community as an organic body. The term corporatism is based on the Latin root word "corpus" (plural – "corpora") meaning "body".'
In other words, corporatism was not only made up of business interests, but all major (and competing) interests within society.
This is not to downplay the importance and absolute seriousness of confronting the increasing absolutism of ruling business interests. It is also not to downplay the historical truth of who ultimately held power in Fascist Italy. But I think it is also important to place Fascism in it's own historical context, and not try to blur historical lines where doing so may be misleading. When Fascists spoke of corporatism they had something else in mind, and it does not help us to blur the distinction.
hemeantwell November 4, 2015 at 8:35 am
Good point, and it raises this question: how can institutional organicity, with its ideological aura of community, partnership, and good old Volkishness, develop when we're talking about corporations that are multinational in scope as well as financialized and thereby even more rootless and and community indifferent? How can organicity develop in the sort of institutional setup foreshadowed by the TPP?
sd November 4, 2015 at 1:09 am
My impression is that today Corporatism more closely represents the interests of multinational corporations and the people who hold executive leadership positions within those companies. What they have in common is a listing on NYSE.
Oregoncharles November 4, 2015 at 1:09 am
Anyone heard from Naomi Wolf lately? She was the most prominent author calling out fascism during the Bush administration, got wide coverage at least on the left. She re-emerged during the Occupy movement, for a little while.
I ask that because, at the time, she said she'd go silent if it looked like people like her (that is, writers/journalists) were being persecuted. Haven't heard from her, at least on this topic, since Obama started prosecuting whistleblowers. Didn't see a farewell, either.
And that leads to a personal question: how safe are our bloggers feeling? Arguably, this site is an exercise in personal courage. Any ugly straws in the wind?
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derinsular.com
This paper argues that Mancur Olson's theory of distributional coalitions largely explains this network's raison d'être. The paper first outlines the main tenets of the theory, and then examines the historical roots of the Turkish deep state, as well as the paradigm shift its exposure caused in the public opinion. The network's
- exclusive character,
- impacts on the workings of the Turkish society, and finally
- efforts to sustain its dominating influence, which is manifested especially in its attempts to reverse the country's democratization process,
demonstrate that the emergence, influence, and the incentives of the Turkish deep state confirm the fundamental assumptions of Olson's theory.
The Theory of Distributional Coalitions Mancur Olson's theory of distributional coalitions holds that, as societies establish themselves, group interests become more identifiable, and subsets of the society organize in an effort to secure these interests. Since these interests are best served by coordinated action, institutions emerge. Yet, such institutions tend to be exclusive by nature, and pursue only the interests of their own members, who account to a very small minority.
This exclusivity factor is of special importance in the way these rent-seeking (or special-interest) groups operate, since, unlike highly-encompassing organizations, exclusive organizations do not have an incentive to increase the productivity of the society. This is due to the disproportion between the sizes of the exclusive organization and the population. To use Olson's idiom, such organizations are in a position either to make larger the pie the society produces or to obtain larger slices for their members.
"Our intuition tells us," Olson says, "that the first method will rarely be chosen."2 Because, on the one hand, it is very costly to increase the productivity of society as a whole, and on the other, even if this is achieved, the The Rise and Decline of the Turkish "Deep State": The Ergenekon Case 101 members of the minuscule organization will accordingly reap only a minuscule portion of the benefits.
Therefore, exclusive groups aim to present their own interests as being the interests of their constituencies, and to use all of their organizational power for collective action in that direction.
That is still the case even when the organization's cost to the society is significantly more than the benefits it seeks for its members. Such behavior is not at all unexpected of exclusive organizations, since it is the very policy of exclusion itself that enables the group to distribute more to its members.In that respect, disproportional allocation of resources goes hand in hand with barriers to entry into the favored areas of the special-interest group.
Yet the existence of barriers to entry further damages the society by reducing the economic growth.
When coupled with the interferences of the special-interest groups with the possibilities of change in the existing state of affairs, the level of the reduction in economic growth can be large.
In order to achieve their goals, special-interest groups engage in lobbying activities and collusion – both of which, by creating special provisions and exceptions, further increase not only inefficiency but also (1) the complexity of regulation, (2) the scope of government, and (3) the complexity of understandings.
The Formation and the Evolution of the Turkish Deep State The genesis of the Turkish deep state is traceable to the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP, İttihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti), a secret society founded in Istanbul in 1889 by a group of medical students who had a passion for reform in the Ottoman Empire.3 The CUP organized so extensively that, in less than two decades, it became a revolutionary political organization with branches inside and outside the Ottoman Empire.4 Within the organization existed numerous factions, and the body of membership was ethnically and even ideologically diverse.
Yet it was the commonly-shared goal of changing the regime rather than conformity that bound the members together, and they successfully achieved that goal with the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, which restored the Constitution of 1876 (Kanun-ı Esasi) that restricted the powers of the Sultan, and made the Ottoman Empire a constitutional monarchy again after 32 years of absolutism.
The genesis of the Turkish deep state is traceable to the Committee of Union and Progress, a secret society founded in Istanbul in 1889 by a group of medical students who had a passion for reform in the Ottoman Empire SERDAR KAYA 102 What makes the CUP extraordinary as a case is that it never fully transformed into a genuine political party even after the revolution it brought about.
Instead, it continued to operate as the secret committee it always was.5 Back then, in reference to this fact, some of the critics of the CUP had coined the phrase "invisible people" (rical-i gayb).6 In the end, this code of conduct rendered the committee as a clandestine force that exerted influence by informal means in order to change the course of affairs the way it saw fit.
The reflections of that proclivity are traceable in many of the major occurrences of the time.
In what is today commonly referred to as the coup of 1913, for example, a group of CUP operatives broke into the Sublime Porte as the Cabinet was in session, murdered the minister of defense and two prominent government officials, and forced the Grand Vizier, the head of the Cabinet, to resign immediately.
The coup of 1913 is also important in that it set a precedent in the country for military interventions and ultimatums, the latest of which occurred on April 27, 2007.
A second example to the code of conduct of the CUP may be the clandestine activities of the Special Organization7 (Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa).
Although the CUP established the Special Organization in 1913, ten months after the coup of 1913, it was in fact the continuation of the Fedaiin, the secret organization the CUP established in 1905 – that is, before the Young Turk Revolution of 1908.
The CUP used the Fedaiin to have its political opponents assassinated, among other things, and later on, employed the Special Organization in the mass killings of the Ottoman- Armenians in 1915.8 The CUP disbanded in 1918, a year that also marked the beginning of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I.
However, many of its members as well as the political culture it created survived within the Republic of Turkey.
To this day, "Unionism" (İttihatçılık) has persisted in the political culture of Turkey, and has manifested itself primarily in (1) ultranationalism, (2) military involvement/ intervention in politics, and (3) justification of extrajudicial activities and violence in the name of the fatherland (vatan).
Nevertheless, different aspects of this political culture have gained primacy in different periods, and with the influence of the changes in the domestic and international conjuncture, it more or less evolved. For example, during the One Party Era (1925-45), the influence of interwarperiod fascism further radicalized the nationalist ideology of the ruling cadre. Then, in the 1960s, variations of the same Unionist background found expression The Rise and Decline of the Turkish "Deep State": The Ergenekon Case 103 in the rightist and leftist political movements, which, unsurprisingly, entered into violent conflict in the 1970s.
In the mid-1980s, the Kurdish question reemerged with the terrorist activities of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), the separatist guerilla group, which became a source of instability in the southeast region of the country, and in so doing, provided a new fertile ground for the clandestine operations of the Turkish deep state.
Of particular importance among these clandestine operations were those by the Gendarmarie Intelligence and Counter-terror Unit (JİTEM, Jandarma İstihbarat ve Terörle Mücadele), which is allegedly responsible for thousands of extrajudicial executions and assassinations of PKK sympathizers and supporters.
Yet the same decade also marked the time period in which Turkey opened its borders and started to integrate with the rest of the world. As a result, after the 1980s, new social, political and economic perspectives started to emerge. However, this new West that Turkey came to closer contact with during and after the 1980s was fundamentally different from the West of the interwar period in that the former was democratic, and the latter fascist.
The increasing interaction with the West did not instantly trigger the demands for democratization in the country. It was the Susurluk scandal and a combination of other events that occurred approximately a decade later that started to dramatically shift the prevalant paradigms. On the one hand, these experiences created a more profound societal cognizance of questioning authority, and on the other, in line with these experiences, people came to attach new meanings to the nature of the state-society relations in Turkey in a manner which provided a more convenient ground for the democratization process in the country.
Apparently, these paradigm shifts also coincided with the developments since the Helsinki European Council of 1999, where the European Union (EU) formally referred to Turkey as a candidate and thus invigorated the country's accession process.
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February 21, 2014 | billmoyers.com
Rome lived upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face. Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no industry in Rome. By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of the Atlas, the grain of Africa and Egypt; and the carts brought out nothing but loads of dung. That was their return cargo.
– The Martyrdom of Man by Winwood Reade (1871)
There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power. [1]
During the last five years, the news media has been flooded with pundits decrying the broken politics of Washington. The conventional wisdom has it that partisan gridlock and dysfunction have become the new normal. That is certainly the case, and I have been among the harshest critics of this development. But it is also imperative to acknowledge the limits of this critique as it applies to the American governmental system. On one level, the critique is self-evident: In the domain that the public can see, Congress is hopelessly deadlocked in the worst manner since the 1850s, the violently rancorous decade preceding the Civil War.
Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country…As I wrote in The Party is Over, the present objective of congressional Republicans is to render the executive branch powerless, at least until a Republican president is elected (a goal that voter suppression laws in GOP-controlled states are clearly intended to accomplish). President Obama cannot enact his domestic policies and budgets: Because of incessant GOP filibustering, not only could he not fill the large number of vacancies in the federal judiciary, he could not even get his most innocuous presidential appointees into office. Democrats controlling the Senate have responded by weakening the filibuster of nominations, but Republicans are sure to react with other parliamentary delaying tactics. This strategy amounts to congressional nullification of executive branch powers by a party that controls a majority in only one house of Congress.
Despite this apparent impotence, President Obama can liquidate American citizens without due processes, detain prisoners indefinitely without charge, conduct dragnet surveillance on the American people without judicial warrant and engage in unprecedented - at least since the McCarthy era - witch hunts against federal employees (the so-called "Insider Threat Program"). Within the United States, this power is characterized by massive displays of intimidating force by militarized federal, state and local law enforcement. Abroad, President Obama can start wars at will and engage in virtually any other activity whatsoever without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress, such as arranging the forced landing of a plane carrying a sovereign head of state over foreign territory. Despite the habitual cant of congressional Republicans about executive overreach by Obama, the would-be dictator, we have until recently heard very little from them about these actions - with the minor exception of comments from gadfly Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Democrats, save a few mavericks such as Ron Wyden of Oregon, are not unduly troubled, either - even to the extent of permitting seemingly perjured congressional testimony under oath by executive branch officials on the subject of illegal surveillance.
These are not isolated instances of a contradiction; they have been so pervasive that they tend to be disregarded as background noise. During the time in 2011 when political warfare over the debt ceiling was beginning to paralyze the business of governance in Washington, the United States government somehow summoned the resources to overthrow Muammar Ghaddafi's regime in Libya, and, when the instability created by that coup spilled over into Mali, provide overt and covert assistance to French intervention there. At a time when there was heated debate about continuing meat inspections and civilian air traffic control because of the budget crisis, our government was somehow able to commit $115 million to keeping a civil war going in Syria and to pay at least £100m to the United Kingdom's Government Communications Headquarters to buy influence over and access to that country's intelligence. Since 2007, two bridges carrying interstate highways have collapsed due to inadequate maintenance of infrastructure, one killing 13 people. During that same period of time, the government spent $1.7 billion constructing a building in Utah that is the size of 17 football fields. This mammoth structure is intended to allow the National Security Agency to store a yottabyte of information, the largest numerical designator computer scientists have coined. A yottabyte is equal to 500 quintillion pages of text. They need that much storage to archive every single trace of your electronic life.
Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose. My analysis of this phenomenon is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day. Nor can this other government be accurately termed an "establishment." All complex societies have an establishment, a social network committed to its own enrichment and perpetuation. In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global reach, the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by itself. That said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. The institution is not so much sinister (although it has highly sinister aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched. Far from being invincible, its failures, such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it is only the Deep State's protectiveness towards its higher-ranking personnel that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent ineptitude. [2]
How did I come to write an analysis of the Deep State, and why am I equipped to write it? As a congressional staff member for 28 years specializing in national security and possessing a top secret security clearance, I was at least on the fringes of the world I am describing, if neither totally in it by virtue of full membership nor of it by psychological disposition. But, like virtually every employed person, I became, to some extent, assimilated into the culture of the institution I worked for, and only by slow degrees, starting before the invasion of Iraq, did I begin fundamentally to question the reasons of state that motivate the people who are, to quote George W. Bush, "the deciders."
Reactions: Andrew Bacevich on Washington's Tacit Consensus
Cultural assimilation is partly a matter of what psychologist Irving L. Janis called "groupthink," the chameleon-like ability of people to adopt the views of their superiors and peers. This syndrome is endemic to Washington: The town is characterized by sudden fads, be it negotiating biennial budgeting, making grand bargains or invading countries. Then, after a while, all the town's cool kids drop those ideas as if they were radioactive. As in the military, everybody has to get on board with the mission, and questioning it is not a career-enhancing move. The universe of people who will critically examine the goings-on at the institutions they work for is always going to be a small one. As Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."A more elusive aspect of cultural assimilation is the sheer dead weight of the ordinariness of it all once you have planted yourself in your office chair for the 10,000th time. Government life is typically not some vignette from an Allen Drury novel about intrigue under the Capitol dome. Sitting and staring at the clock on the off-white office wall when it's 11:00 in the evening and you are vowing never, ever to eat another piece of takeout pizza in your life is not an experience that summons the higher literary instincts of a would-be memoirist. After a while, a functionary of the state begins to hear things that, in another context, would be quite remarkable, or at least noteworthy, and yet that simply bounce off one's consciousness like pebbles off steel plate: "You mean the number of terrorist groups we are fighting is classified?" No wonder so few people are whistle-blowers, quite apart from the vicious retaliation whistle-blowing often provokes: Unless one is blessed with imagination and a fine sense of irony, growing immune to the curiousness of one's surroundings is easy. To paraphrase the inimitable Donald Rumsfeld, I didn't know all that I knew, at least until I had had a couple of years away from the government to reflect upon it.
The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street. All these agencies are coordinated by the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council. Certain key areas of the judiciary belong to the Deep State, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose actions are mysterious even to most members of Congress. Also included are a handful of vital federal trial courts, such as the Eastern District of Virginia and the Southern District of Manhattan, where sensitive proceedings in national security cases are conducted. The final government component (and possibly last in precedence among the formal branches of government established by the Constitution) is a kind of rump Congress consisting of the congressional leadership and some (but not all) of the members of the defense and intelligence committees. The rest of Congress, normally so fractious and partisan, is mostly only intermittently aware of the Deep State and when required usually submits to a few well-chosen words from the State's emissaries.
I saw this submissiveness on many occasions. One memorable incident was passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act of 2008. This legislation retroactively legalized the Bush administration's illegal and unconstitutional surveillance first revealed by The New York Times in 2005 and indemnified the telecommunications companies for their cooperation in these acts. The bill passed easily: All that was required was the invocation of the word "terrorism" and most members of Congress responded like iron filings obeying a magnet. One who responded in that fashion was Senator Barack Obama, soon to be coronated as the presidential nominee at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. He had already won the most delegates by campaigning to the left of his main opponent, Hillary Clinton, on the excesses of the global war on terror and the erosion of constitutional liberties.
As the indemnification vote showed, the Deep State does not consist only of government agencies. What is euphemistically called "private enterprise" is an integral part of its operations. In a special series in The Washington Post called "Top Secret America," Dana Priest and William K. Arkin described the scope of the privatized Deep State and the degree to which it has metastasized after the September 11 attacks. There are now 854,000 contract personnel with top-secret clearances - a number greater than that of top-secret-cleared civilian employees of the government. While they work throughout the country and the world, their heavy concentration in and around the Washington suburbs is unmistakable: Since 9/11, 33 facilities for top-secret intelligence have been built or are under construction. Combined, they occupy the floor space of almost three Pentagons - about 17 million square feet. Seventy percent of the intelligence community's budget goes to paying contracts. And the membrane between government and industry is highly permeable: The Director of National Intelligence, James R. Clapper, is a former executive of Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the government's largest intelligence contractors. His predecessor as director, Admiral Mike McConnell, is the current vice chairman of the same company; Booz Allen is 99 percent dependent on government business. These contractors now set the political and social tone of Washington, just as they are increasingly setting the direction of the country, but they are doing it quietly, their doings unrecorded in the Congressional Record or the Federal Register, and are rarely subject to congressional hearings.
Reactions: Danielle Brian on Legalized Corruption
Washington is the most important node of the Deep State that has taken over America, but it is not the only one. Invisible threads of money and ambition connect the town to other nodes. One is Wall Street, which supplies the cash that keeps the political machine quiescent and operating as a diversionary marionette theater. Should the politicians forget their lines and threaten the status quo, Wall Street floods the town with cash and lawyers to help the hired hands remember their own best interests. The executives of the financial giants even have de facto criminal immunity. On March 6, 2013, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Eric Holder stated the following: "I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy." This, from the chief law enforcement officer of a justice system that has practically abolished the constitutional right to trial for poorer defendants charged with certain crimes. It is not too much to say that Wall Street may be the ultimate owner of the Deep State and its strategies, if for no other reason than that it has the money to reward government operatives with a second career that is lucrative beyond the dreams of avarice - certainly beyond the dreams of a salaried government employee. [3]The corridor between Manhattan and Washington is a well trodden highway for the personalities we have all gotten to know in the period since the massive deregulation of Wall Street: Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Henry Paulson, Timothy Geithner and many others. Not all the traffic involves persons connected with the purely financial operations of the government: In 2013, General David Petraeus joined KKR (formerly Kohlberg Kravis Roberts) of 9 West 57th Street, New York, a private equity firm with $62.3 billion in assets. KKR specializes in management buyouts and leveraged finance. General Petraeus' expertise in these areas is unclear. His ability to peddle influence, however, is a known and valued commodity. Unlike Cincinnatus, the military commanders of the Deep State do not take up the plow once they lay down the sword. Petraeus also obtained a sinecure as a non-resident senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. The Ivy League is, of course, the preferred bleaching tub and charm school of the American oligarchy. [4]
Petraeus and most of the avatars of the Deep State - the White House advisers who urged Obama not to impose compensation limits on Wall Street CEOs, the contractor-connected think tank experts who besought us to "stay the course" in Iraq, the economic gurus who perpetually demonstrate that globalization and deregulation are a blessing that makes us all better off in the long run - are careful to pretend that they have no ideology. Their preferred pose is that of the politically neutral technocrat offering well considered advice based on profound expertise. That is nonsense. They are deeply dyed in the hue of the official ideology of the governing class, an ideology that is neither specifically Democrat nor Republican. Domestically, whatever they might privately believe about essentially diversionary social issues such as abortion or gay marriage, they almost invariably believe in the "Washington Consensus": financialization, outsourcing, privatization, deregulation and the commodifying of labor. Internationally, they espouse 21st-century "American Exceptionalism": the right and duty of the United States to meddle in every region of the world with coercive diplomacy and boots on the ground and to ignore painfully won international norms of civilized behavior. To paraphrase what Sir John Harrington said more than 400 years ago about treason, now that the ideology of the Deep State has prospered, none dare call it ideology. [5] That is why describing torture with the word "torture" on broadcast television is treated less as political heresy than as an inexcusable lapse of Washington etiquette: Like smoking a cigarette on camera, these days it is simply "not done."
Reactions: Heidi Boghosian on Mass Surveillance
After Edward Snowden's revelations about the extent and depth of surveillance by the National Security Agency, it has become publicly evident that Silicon Valley is a vital node of the Deep State as well. Unlike military and intelligence contractors, Silicon Valley overwhelmingly sells to the private market, but its business is so important to the government that a strange relationship has emerged. While the government could simply dragoon the high technology companies to do the NSA's bidding, it would prefer cooperation with so important an engine of the nation's economy, perhaps with an implied quid pro quo. Perhaps this explains the extraordinary indulgence the government shows the Valley in intellectual property matters. If an American "jailbreaks" his smartphone (i.e., modifies it so that it can use a service provider other than the one dictated by the manufacturer), he could receive a fine of up to $500,000 and several years in prison; so much for a citizen's vaunted property rights to what he purchases. The libertarian pose of the Silicon Valley moguls, so carefully cultivated in their public relations, has always been a sham. Silicon Valley has long been tracking for commercial purposes the activities of every person who uses an electronic device, so it is hardly surprising that the Deep State should emulate the Valley and do the same for its own purposes. Nor is it surprising that it should conscript the Valley's assistance.
Still, despite the essential roles of lower Manhattan and Silicon Valley, the center of gravity of the Deep State is firmly situated in and around the Beltway. The Deep State's physical expansion and consolidation around the Beltway would seem to make a mockery of the frequent pronouncement that governance in Washington is dysfunctional and broken. That the secret and unaccountable Deep State floats freely above the gridlock between both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue is the paradox of American government in the 21st century: drone strikes, data mining, secret prisons and Panopticon-like control on the one hand; and on the other, the ordinary, visible parliamentary institutions of self-government declining to the status of a banana republic amid the gradual collapse of public infrastructure.
The results of this contradiction are not abstract, as a tour of the rotting, decaying, bankrupt cities of the American Midwest will attest. It is not even confined to those parts of the country left behind by a Washington Consensus that decreed the financialization and deindustrialization of the economy in the interests of efficiency and shareholder value. This paradox is evident even within the Beltway itself, the richest metropolitan area in the nation. Although demographers and urban researchers invariably count Washington as a "world city," that is not always evident to those who live there. Virtually every time there is a severe summer thunderstorm, tens - or even hundreds - of thousands of residents lose power, often for many days. There are occasional water restrictions over wide areas because water mains, poorly constructed and inadequately maintained, have burst. [6] The Washington metropolitan area considers it a Herculean task just to build a rail link to its international airport - with luck it may be completed by 2018.
It is as if Hadrian's Wall was still fully manned and the fortifications along the border with Germania were never stronger, even as the city of Rome disintegrates from within and the life-sustaining aqueducts leading down from the hills begin to crumble. The governing classes of the Deep State may continue to deceive themselves with their dreams of Zeus-like omnipotence, but others do not. A 2013 Pew Poll that interviewed 38,000 people around the world found that in 23 of 39 countries surveyed, a plurality of respondents said they believed China already had or would in the future replace the United States as the world's top economic power.
The Deep State is the big story of our time. It is the red thread that runs through the war on terrorism, the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic social structure and political dysfunction. Washington is the headquarters of the Deep State, and its time in the sun as a rival to Rome, Constantinople or London may be term-limited by its overweening sense of self-importance and its habit, as Winwood Reade said of Rome, to "live upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face." "Living upon its principal," in this case, means that the Deep State has been extracting value from the American people in vampire-like fashion.
We are faced with two disagreeable implications. First, that the Deep State is so heavily entrenched, so well protected by surveillance, firepower, money and its ability to co-opt resistance that it is almost impervious to change. Second, that just as in so many previous empires, the Deep State is populated with those whose instinctive reaction to the failure of their policies is to double down on those very policies in the future. Iraq was a failure briefly camouflaged by the wholly propagandistic success of the so-called surge; this legerdemain allowed for the surge in Afghanistan, which equally came to naught. Undeterred by that failure, the functionaries of the Deep State plunged into Libya; the smoking rubble of the Benghazi consulate, rather than discouraging further misadventure, seemed merely to incite the itch to bomb Syria. Will the Deep State ride on the back of the American people from failure to failure until the country itself, despite its huge reserves of human and material capital, is slowly exhausted? The dusty road of empire is strewn with the bones of former great powers that exhausted themselves in like manner.
Reactions: Henry Giroux on Resisting the Neoliberal Revolution
But, there are signs of resistance to the Deep State and its demands. In the aftermath of the Snowden revelations, the House narrowly failed to pass an amendment that would have defunded the NSA's warrantless collection of data from US persons. Shortly thereafter, the president, advocating yet another military intervention in the Middle East, this time in Syria, met with such overwhelming congressional skepticism that he changed the subject by grasping at a diplomatic lifeline thrown to him by Vladimir Putin. [7]Has the visible, constitutional state, the one envisaged by Madison and the other Founders, finally begun to reassert itself against the claims and usurpations of the Deep State? To some extent, perhaps. The unfolding revelations of the scope of the NSA's warrantless surveillance have become so egregious that even institutional apologists such as Senator Dianne Feinstein have begun to backpedal - if only rhetorically - from their knee-jerk defense of the agency. As more people begin to waken from the fearful and suggestible state that 9/11 created in their minds, it is possible that the Deep State's decade-old tactic of crying "terrorism!" every time it faces resistance is no longer eliciting the same Pavlovian response of meek obedience. And the American people, possibly even their legislators, are growing tired of endless quagmires in the Middle East.
But there is another more structural reason the Deep State may have peaked in the extent of its dominance. While it seems to float above the constitutional state, its essentially parasitic, extractive nature means that it is still tethered to the formal proceedings of governance. The Deep State thrives when there is tolerable functionality in the day-to-day operations of the federal government. As long as appropriations bills get passed on time, promotion lists get confirmed, black (i.e., secret) budgets get rubber-stamped, special tax subsidies for certain corporations are approved without controversy, as long as too many awkward questions are not asked, the gears of the hybrid state will mesh noiselessly. But when one house of Congress is taken over by tea party Wahhabites, life for the ruling class becomes more trying.
If there is anything the Deep State requires it is silent, uninterrupted cash flow and the confidence that things will go on as they have in the past. It is even willing to tolerate a degree of gridlock: Partisan mud wrestling over cultural issues may be a useful distraction from its agenda. But recent congressional antics involving sequestration, the government shutdown and the threat of default over the debt ceiling extension have been disrupting that equilibrium. And an extreme gridlock dynamic has developed between the two parties such that continuing some level of sequestration is politically the least bad option for both parties, albeit for different reasons. As much as many Republicans might want to give budget relief to the organs of national security, they cannot fully reverse sequestration without the Democrats demanding revenue increases. And Democrats wanting to spend more on domestic discretionary programs cannot void sequestration on either domestic or defense programs without Republicans insisting on entitlement cuts.
So, for the foreseeable future, the Deep State must restrain its appetite for taxpayer dollars. Limited deals may soften sequestration, but agency requests will not likely be fully funded anytime soon. Even Wall Street's rentier operations have been affected: After helping finance the tea party to advance its own plutocratic ambitions, America's Big Money is now regretting the Frankenstein's monster it has created. Like children playing with dynamite, the tea party and its compulsion to drive the nation into credit default has alarmed the grown-ups commanding the heights of capital; the latter are now telling the politicians they thought they had hired to knock it off.
The House vote to defund the NSA's illegal surveillance programs was equally illustrative of the disruptive nature of the tea party insurgency. Civil liberties Democrats alone would never have come so close to victory; tea party stalwart Justin Amash (R-MI), who has also upset the business community for his debt-limit fundamentalism, was the lead Republican sponsor of the NSA amendment, and most of the Republicans who voted with him were aligned with the tea party.
The final factor is Silicon Valley. Owing to secrecy and obfuscation, it is hard to know how much of the NSA's relationship with the Valley is based on voluntary cooperation, how much is legal compulsion through FISA warrants and how much is a matter of the NSA surreptitiously breaking into technology companies' systems. Given the Valley's public relations requirement to mollify its customers who have privacy concerns, it is difficult to take the tech firms' libertarian protestations about government compromise of their systems at face value, especially since they engage in similar activity against their own customers for commercial purposes. That said, evidence is accumulating that Silicon Valley is losing billions in overseas business from companies, individuals and governments that want to maintain privacy. For high tech entrepreneurs, the cash nexus is ultimately more compelling than the Deep State's demand for patriotic cooperation. Even legal compulsion can be combatted: Unlike the individual citizen, tech firms have deep pockets and batteries of lawyers with which to fight government diktat.
This pushback has gone so far that on January 17, President Obama announced revisions to the NSA's data collection programs, including withdrawing the agency's custody of a domestic telephone record database, expanding requirements for judicial warrants and ceasing to spy on (undefined) "friendly foreign leaders." Critics have denounced the changes as a cosmetic public relations move, but they are still significant in that the clamor has gotten so loud that the president feels the political need to address it.
When the contradictions within a ruling ideology are pushed too far, factionalism appears and that ideology begins slowly to crumble. Corporate oligarchs such as the Koch brothers are no longer entirely happy with the faux-populist political front group they helped fund and groom. Silicon Valley, for all the Ayn Rand-like tendencies of its major players, its offshoring strategies and its further exacerbation of income inequality, is now lobbying Congress to restrain the NSA, a core component of the Deep State. Some tech firms are moving to encrypt their data. High tech corporations and governments alike seek dominance over people though collection of personal data, but the corporations are jumping ship now that adverse public reaction to the NSA scandals threatens their profits.
The outcome of all these developments is uncertain. The Deep State, based on the twin pillars of national security imperative and corporate hegemony, has until recently seemed unshakable and the latest events may only be a temporary perturbation in its trajectory. But history has a way of toppling the altars of the mighty. While the two great materialist and determinist ideologies of the twentieth century, Marxism and the Washington Consensus, successively decreed that the dictatorship of the proletariat and the dictatorship of the market were inevitable, the future is actually indeterminate. It may be that deep economic and social currents create the framework of history, but those currents can be channeled, eddied, or even reversed by circumstance, chance and human agency. We have only to reflect upon defunct glacial despotisms such as the USSR or East Germany to realize that nothing is forever.
Throughout history, state systems with outsized pretensions to power have reacted to their environments in two ways. The first strategy, reflecting the ossification of its ruling elites, consists of repeating that nothing is wrong, that the status quo reflects the nation's unique good fortune in being favored by God and that those calling for change are merely subversive troublemakers. As the French ancien régime, the Romanov dynasty and the Habsburg emperors discovered, the strategy works splendidly for a while, particularly if one has a talent for dismissing unpleasant facts. The final results, however, are likely to be thoroughly disappointing.The second strategy is one embraced to varying degrees and with differing goals, by figures of such contrasting personalities as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle and Deng Xiaoping. They were certainly not revolutionaries by temperament; if anything, their natures were conservative. But they understood that the political cultures in which they lived were fossilized and incapable of adapting to the times. In their drive to reform and modernize the political systems they inherited, their first obstacles to overcome were the outworn myths that encrusted the thinking of the elites of their time.
As the United States confronts its future after experiencing two failed wars, a precarious economy and $17 trillion in accumulated debt, the national punditry has split into two camps. The first, the declinists, sees a broken, dysfunctional political system incapable of reform and an economy soon to be overtaken by China. The second, the reformers, offers a profusion of nostrums to turn the nation around: public financing of elections to sever the artery of money between the corporate components of the Deep State and financially dependent elected officials, government "insourcing" to reverse the tide of outsourcing of government functions and the conflicts of interest that it creates, a tax policy that values human labor over financial manipulation and a trade policy that favors exporting manufactured goods over exporting investment capital.
Mike Lofgren on the Deep State Hiding in Plain Sight All of that is necessary, but not sufficient. The Snowden revelations (the impact of which have been surprisingly strong), the derailed drive for military intervention in Syria and a fractious Congress, whose dysfunction has begun to be a serious inconvenience to the Deep State, show that there is now a deep but as yet inchoate hunger for change. What America lacks is a figure with the serene self-confidence to tell us that the twin idols of national security and corporate power are outworn dogmas that have nothing more to offer us. Thus disenthralled, the people themselves will unravel the Deep State with surprising speed.
[1] The term "Deep State" was coined in Turkey and is said to be a system composed of high-level elements within the intelligence services, military, security, judiciary and organized crime. In British author John le Carré's latest novel, A Delicate Truth, a character describes the Deep State as "… the ever-expanding circle of non-governmental insiders from banking, industry and commerce who were cleared for highly classified information denied to large swathes of Whitehall and Westminster." I use the term to mean a hybrid association of elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States without reference to the consent of the governed as expressed through the formal political process.
[2] Twenty-five years ago, the sociologist Robert Nisbet described this phenomenon as "the attribute of No Fault…. Presidents, secretaries and generals and admirals in America seemingly subscribe to the doctrine that no fault ever attaches to policy and operations. This No Fault conviction prevents them from taking too seriously such notorious foul-ups as Desert One, Grenada, Lebanon and now the Persian Gulf." To his list we might add 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.
[3] The attitude of many members of Congress towards Wall Street was memorably expressed by Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL), the incoming chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, in 2010: "In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks."
[4] Beginning in 1988, every US president has been a graduate of Harvard or Yale. Beginning in 2000, every losing presidential candidate has been a Harvard or Yale graduate, with the exception of John McCain in 2008.
[5] In recent months, the American public has seen a vivid example of a Deep State operative marketing his ideology under the banner of pragmatism. Former Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates - a one-time career CIA officer and deeply political Bush family retainer - has camouflaged his retrospective defense of military escalations that have brought us nothing but casualties and fiscal grief as the straight-from-the-shoulder memoir from a plain-spoken son of Kansas who disdains Washington and its politicians.
[6] Meanwhile, the US government took the lead in restoring Baghdad's sewer system at a cost of $7 billion.
[7] Obama's abrupt about-face suggests he may have been skeptical of military intervention in Syria all along, but only dropped that policy once Congress and Putin gave him the running room to do so. In 2009, he went ahead with the Afghanistan "surge" partly because General Petraeus' public relations campaign and back-channel lobbying on the Hill for implementation of his pet military strategy pre-empted other options. These incidents raise the disturbing question of how much the democratically elected president - or any president - sets the policy of the national security state and how much the policy is set for him by the professional operatives of that state who engineer faits accomplis that force his hand.
Mike Lofgren is a former congressional staff member who served on both the House and Senate budget committees. His book about Congress, The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted, appeared in paperback on August 27, 2013.
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- Anonymous
Another attribute of the "Deep State" is that is highly nepotistic. Entry into it relies on connections rather than skill. Many positions within it exist simply to provide suitably lucrative work for the children of the ruling class.
- Nisswapaddy
Lofgren has certainly provided a good overview of the situation, although what he postulates is by no means original thinking. However, it is particularly heartening to have this analysis come from a fellow who could easily have sold his soul like David Petraeus, to name just one in an endless line of the well connected who have cashed in. Yet I believe our situation is more dire than even Lofgren suggests. As the philosopher John Ralston Saul characterized it, we have undergone a coup d'etat in slow motion and now live, not in a constitutional democracy but 'Democracy Inc.' (described in detail in a book by the same name by Prof. Sheldon Wolin). LIke Lofgren, neither of these thinkers sees some carefully contrived conspiracy at work. It is merely the inevitable result of following a rigid ideology that allows unfettered corporate capitalism to have its way unopposed and essentially unregulated. Now that massive corporation have taken control of all the levers of power (as Lofgren summarizes above) it will be very, very difficult for 'the people' to take them back. Remember what Upton Sinclair observed over 100 years ago:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon him NOT understanding it."
I give you men like Dave Petraeus, or Jamie Dimon or (fill in the blank) who are subject to this 'lack of understanding'. They are not co-conspirators, at least not in any active, conscious sense. However, the corporations they work for, whose only function is to maximize profits for the benefit of their shareholders and investors and to 'externalize' any and all costs and expenses possible, are, by definition, sociopaths. And those corporations, run by men and women simply doing their jobs and going home to a loving family, also have a 'lack of understanding'. When the corporation you work for has only reason for being, to make a profit 'come heck or high water', and that corporation and hundreds of others with the she mission, control the executive, congress, the judiciary and their regulators (who are now required to call the corporations they supposedly regulate "their customers" ) it doesn't take much imagination to see how we got where we are. Nor how it is that corporations get what they need, the rest of us be dammed. In short, the 'deep state' Lofgren shines a light on is much deeper than he indicates. And it will take more than spats between large corporations to bring it to an end.
- William Jacoby
Good essay but everybody should know this by now. In the next elections, in which good candidates will by definition not be viable because they won't be bankrolled by the Deep State, we must use the alternative media to coalesce around a few non-negotiable demands. Things like prosecuting Clapper for lying, immediate prohibition of the intelligence community's revolving door, nationalization of companies like Booz Allen, creation of public banks as suggested by Ellen Brown and nationalization of banks too big to fail, a student loan debt strike, and a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United. Failure to grant these demands must be met with withdrawal from the two-party system; go Green or go Libertarian, whichever you prefer, but put a monkey wrench in the system. Keep using the alternative media, defend them from the Deep State, educate yourself, network with the growing numbers of people who are onto the Deep State, or the National Security State, or whatever you want to call it. But get over talking about how the Constitution is in danger; it's dead, and if there's anything you liked about it, you'll have to bring it back from the graveyard. Take action, and support others who do.
- cross1242
Unfortunately, I don't see anything changing the Deep State or the government in Washington until there is some kind of revolution. That revolution might be bloodless but nothing guarantees that. If the Deep State ultimately feels threatened, it will defend itself with all the national security forces at its command.
Yes. An example. Paper granted PhD's are "promised" suitably lucrative work in academia. So it's not just corporate.
- http://twilightirruption.blogspot.com/ abbeysbooks
Time for you to read Foucault's Discipline and Punish and all the rest of his work. Include Virilio, Baudrillard and the rest of Continental Philosophy. Lofgren is just catching up with a long way to go. Check out Zizek.
- Kibik
Look up "Bohemian Club" too.
- Peter Michaelson
The fact that an invisible government of elites is in charge of our democracy is entirely predictable. This political arrangement simply depicts the state of our psychological development. We have a "Deep State" within our unconscious mind. Our thoughts, desires, aspirations, and beliefs are all under the influence of this inner "Deep State." Through our ego we're each like a puppet prince, thinking we're in charge of the show. Both liberals and conservatives have too much invested in self-image and are afraid of facing what amounts to an inner tyranny. We're too egotistical and narcissistic; we don't want to be humbled by inner truth. We've produced superficial psychologies (behavioral, positive, cognitive, etc.) that refuse to face the inner reality. We'll have real democracy in America and the world when we establish inner democracy. It can be done, and it needs to be done soon. Start by tossing out all the so-called "scientific psychology" that academic psychologists are pedaling. Go back to Freud and understand what he's really saying, that we'll go on generating suffering and self-defeat until we become more conscious of our inner conflicts, psychological defenses, and entanglements in negative emotions.
- Anonymous
As has been mentioned the greatest power is the people. Without the cooperation of the people none of the pathological behavior described would be possible. The West Coast Strike of 1934 is an example of what can be done. A major way that the 1% control the 99% is through debt. That control could actually be reversed. What would happen if only 10% of the 99% decided to no longer to pay their debts? A movement like that could rapidly escalate once people realize that there is no system that could cope with massive non payment of debt.
What would happen if the pilots, truck drivers, rail workers and dock workers decided to strike? or the telecommunication workers? All or any of those could be implemented peacefully. No need to hit the streets. Just stay home and contribute nothing to the deep state. Imagine how long it could survive the massive non cooperation of the 99%. There is a multitude of possibilities.- Charles Shaver
'How can I thank thee [Bill Moyers], let me count the ways…' and now, too, Mike Lofgren. For some time I've been thinking that vastly superior aliens from deep space might be holding the U.S. Government hostage and causing all of the recent illegal, immoral, unconstitutional and just plain stupid national self-destruction. What a relief to learn it is only too-typical low IQ humanity that is responsible. Seriously, now, that which gives me the audacity and courage to comment on these things about which I personally know so little, is my lay acquired understanding of the basics. To me, in early 2014, these are mere, obvious, matters of the hierarchy of law, relevant laws and violations thereof.
Ignoring most of the basics and my personal lack of qualifications, suffice it to say for now that above and beyond the laws of man are those self-evident in nature. Insightfully, since August of 1975, I have observed not only do the higher laws apply to both machine and man but the U.S. Constitution is imbedded with them, intentionally or not. So, to finally get to the point, when Mike Lofgren says 'Groupthink' I think of The Universal Law of Order: "Whenever two or more individuals unite to form an organization the survival of the organization becomes paramount to the survival of the individual." and how the Constitution was ignored again. When someone says 'there's nothing I can do' I think of The Third Rule of Human Behavior: "Self-determination shall prevail." and how the Constitution was ignored again. Deep space, or 'Deep State,' it 'don't look good' for us when a vast majority keeps enabling a selfish minority to impose rule. Now, it will probably take a paradigm shift to fix what's broke but, fortunately, naturally, 'shift happens.'
- http://leisureguy.wordpress.com Leisureguy
Magnificent article-greatly extends the range of my awareness, since I was just starting to get a glimpse of this.
It should definitely be noted in the article that Senator Barack Obama pledged and promised that he would vote against telecom immunity and then he voted in favor of it. That did not auger well, albeit accurately.
- http://leisureguy.wordpress.com Leisureguy
This is why bloody revolutions happen: the course of last resort would certainly be violence, which hurts everyone. Elections were supposed to allow an orderly way to bring about change without violence, but once that mechanism is jammed and will no longer respond, violence is lapping at our heels.
- http://leisureguy.wordpress.com Leisureguy
I have the same feeling. We thought we had a mechanism that would enable us to respond to the need for revolutionary change in an orderly way, but that mechanism has been deliberately broken. That is very, very bad.
Although one must allow that much of this is driven by our deep nature: social animals acting as social animals do, with all sorts of social-driven instincts and responses. Biology is destiny?
- rleighton27
I am not part of the hallelujah chorus greeting this article. Some, if not most of it, smacks of the apologia of a professional bureaucrat who suddenly has found a conscience. Also, his claim that President Obama was itching to start a war in Syria, but was only held back from doing so by "overwhelming Congressional skepticism"…as if that wasn't a daily occurrence to be dealt with from day one of his tenure. I am convinced that it was part of his strategy from the outset…to rattle sabres loudly enough to frighten a bellicose Putin, who knew his own military prowess was hampered by an ill-trained and poorly equipped manpower pool, into making his lapdog Assad stop playing nasty with his population–and it worked. I agree with much of the article's commentary about the "boys in the back room" who, in fact, have commandeered the running of the country out of the hands of elected officials, but condemn it's tone of "it really doesn't matter who's in charge." It does matter. Articles of this type just encourage voter apathy, and that plays into the schematic laid out by the Powell Memorandum for the usurping of Democracy, placing it into the hands of the ALEC/Koch consortium of Plutocratic traitors.
- http://leisureguy.wordpress.com Leisureguy
This helps me understand why such an intensive effort is underway to destroy our educational system and the low value we seem to place on education. I'm thinking of privatization, charter schools, constant pressure to pay public money to religious schools, defunding of higher education, closures of departments of humanities and non-applied science and art-that sort of thing. And now I get it: the last thing the corporate state wants is people "wasting" time and effort on a bunch of abstract principles and reasoning and critical thinking, especially since it just causes trouble in the workplace and makes people question orders. Better to do away with that: turn the focus to what will make the most money, and your problem's solved. And then you can cut costs-always the imperative-by closing departments that seem to create the most troublemakers. Two birds, one stone.
- Bob Baldock
Peter Dale Scott articulated this first, and has it deeper and darker. Check his website.
- Anonymous
As I read the final sentence,
"What America lacks is a figure with the serene self-confidence to tell us that the twin idols of national security and corporate power are outworn dogmas that have nothing more to offer us. Thus disenthralled, the people themselves will unravel the Deep State with surprising speed."
I remembered the demise of individuals who fit "figure with serene self-confidence"…..
John F. Kennedy
Martin Luther King
Robert Kennedy
Malcolm X
Paul Wellstone- Joan Harris
It's been awhile since I have had anyone refer to Freud. Never mind the "new age" psychology. Defenses have always been the problem. In a perfect world we would all live consciously and greed and prejudices would give way to peace and harmony. In the meantime we must address all the ills, if for no other reason then to prevent us from becoming complacent. I shall retain a little healthy cynicism until the world is healthy.
- I. Spoke Umbra
Let's be clear about what the "group-think" means when speaking about the NSA:
As someone who was once in the bowels of the NSA beast, I observed a number of disturbing traits permeate every nook and cranny of the operation. If those traits were applied to an individual, they would be considered a very serious characterological disorder, perhaps warranting hospitalization:
1. Paranoid
2. Obsessive compulsive
3. Sociopathic
4. Grandiose
5. Narcissistic (self-rationalizing)
6. Uber-patriotic (self-justifying)The groupthink scenario in that place is as toxic as it can get for a human enterprise. It is a clear and present danger to the security of Democracy as we know it.
- Pamela Zuppo
This was no stroke of genius, this was Greenspan, Reagan, and the Bush clan. The better term for contemporary capitalism is "disaster capitalism" as coined by Naomi Klein. The big question is what are we to do about this? Do what Kiev has done? Due to "group think", or brain-washing of the masses who have lost their own control via their televisions, it seems the zombies outnumber the enlightened. It's clear to me something must be done.
- SufferinSuccotash,Pivoting
Randolph "War is the Health of the State" Bourne is also worth a read. Not to mention Jack London's The Iron Heel. These All-American doods had the National Security-Oligarchy State pretty much nailed down a century ago. Why people concerned with our current predicament skip over these Progressive Era radicals in favor of Continental Philosophy (which reminds me of a skimpy breakfast) is beyond me. I've been watching the emancipatory elements in this country floundering around for the past four decades now and it's pretty depressing, especially the seemingly chronic inability to connect with the USA's radical past. No historical knowledge=no sense of history=no political judgement=the Bad Guys keep on winning.
Ukrainians are my favorite people at the moment and you can bet that their sense of history is pretty sharp.
This concludes this Sunday morning rant.- Joseph Brant
It is commendable to preserve hope among reformers, but hopes do not solve problems.
While security agencies can serve democracy when better regulated, the failure to regulate is the result of failed democratic institutions which have not themselves been "vulnerable to a vigilant public." The dark state invisible power corrupts invisibly, but gold is the invisible power which had already corrupted the visible institutions.
We need more than a "self-confident figure" to tell us that "national security and corporate power are outworn dogmas" so that "the people themselves will unravel the Deep State." The "deep…hunger for change" was deeper in 2008 when so easily destroyed by its self-confident Obama by simply not mentioning what "outworn dogmas" he would change. The hawkish Hillary is not about to "unravel the Deep State" and mere self-confidence will not finance campaigns or buy media support to do more than split the vote of reformers. The media and elections must first be freed of gold, and the people cannot do that without free media and free elections.
While history is full of surprises, the succession of cold-war fearmongering by global war upon diffuse "terrorist" backlash and political opposition to half-witted right wing imperialism does not suggest a passing reaction, nor that any lesson was learned from three generations of failed military adventures with no relationship to the declared national principles. The cancerous dark state has grown in proportion to the failure of right wing foreign policy, the failure of its own rationales. It is the triumphant institution of right wing tyranny as the immune sovereign over a failed democracy.
Democracy may make further ultimate progress in China than in the US, or may survive only in micropowers of no interest to the right wing. But we must have faith in the power of the people, or we lose hope and take no action.
- Barbara Mullin
I call it vulture capitalism.
- jrdel
Since the People of United States overthrew British ruling class government of our country and after the revolution, through wise government, and luck we got out from under the thumb of any rulers whether clerics, nobility, landlords, businessmen, political dictators, banks, etc. etc. these forces have been working to reestablish their control over our lives and by gradual steps have done so. Great Americans turned back the tide here and there for a while, Jackson ended the national bank, T. Roosevelt broke up monopoly corporations, F. Roosevelt supported efforts for economic democracy, etc. but the enemies of liberty never rest and always find new ways to undermine it.
So every few generations the People are faced with another fight if they are to keep their liberties. This time the odds look particularly bad, Enemies stronger, richer, more devious, more insidious, more corrupt; the People weaker, more divided, confused, distracted. What the hell do we do? Voting just doesn't do much. Big money floods the media with their point of view. The People, relatively poorer than ever; don't have enough money to reply.
Petitions, reforms, protests, revolution? All impractical, or impossible (imagine a revolution in the streets against the power of the U.S. military.) The days when we can grab our muskets and go out and make a revolution have long gone folks.
I think humanity will have to wait for another age, and another nation to see real liberty and real democracy in control of the world again.- SufferinSuccotash,Pivoting
Given that back in his day "merchants" were often interchangeable with "bankers" Smith certainly scored a bulls-eye with that one. The perfect Horrible Example in the 1770s was the East India Company, which couldn't govern Bengal without trashing its economy and couldn't keep off the financial rocks either. Eventually the British government put the Company on a shorter leash and still later the Company lost its monopoly over East Indian trade. But one short-term measure to bail out the Company was to give it a monopoly over selling tea to the dumb colonists over in America. Oops. That was a real "tea party", not some bogus affair staged by geezers in funny hats.
- SufferinSuccotash,Pivoting
Of course. I spent quite a few years rationalizing and pretending that Everything Was Pretty Much OK In These Here United States myself. The problem with being a history teacher–at least in this case–is that the past, which as William Faulkner famously said wasn't only not dead but not even past, can catch up with you. This country is paying and will continue to pay pretty heavily for decades of folly which anyone with a sense of history could have predicted at least 40 years ago.
- joanne
We have had millenia to "cage the beast", tame the beast, train, heal, and/or defang the beast. Predatory behavior is mediated, never extinguished. The Deep State is both institutionalized predation and paradoxically, a grotesque attempt to protect itself from itself.
- Anonymous
The ideology is hinted at throughout the article. Capitalism; The premise that money is a form of commodity and the winner is whomever has the most. Unfortunately money is a contract and while such notional promises seemingly can be manufactured to infinity, through the creation of the other side of the ledger, debt, their underlaying value is dependent on the increasingly precarious solvency of those taking on that debt. It is what is referred to in hindsight as a bubble. If you want to see the future of the US in about fifty years, it will likely be in the states and regions.
- J Timothy
The US military-intelligence-industrial aparatus is filled with loyal American patriots who love this country and have sworn to uphold the US Constitution. Unfortunately, they don't seem to understand that the system is extremely expensive and is impoverishing the middle class of America. We have nine air craft carrier groups while the next closest military has just two. Air craft carriers are incredibly expensive.
In my opinion, the next revalation to hit the mainstream media will be that SOME of the covert, clandestine, black budget projects have been financed via securities fraud. They've done it before. Arms for hostages, Hmong drug running in Vietnam, etc, are examples of this. Catherine Austin Fitts has also made a great point that HUD, of all agencies, has funded some black budget procurements.
Clearly, either the CIA or the NSA are at the center of the cabal. So, what is the justification for all of this secracy? What is soooo important that the adult eagle scout christians of America can't tell us? What could it be? Terrorism? Russians? Soverign citizens? Shoe bombers?
Here is where i will lose most people over 50 years old. IN MY OPINION, a the core of the military industrial aparatus and its wall street enablers is a desperate race to achieve near technological parity with….(pregnant pause) (dramatic pause) other entities, species, e.t. collectives, etc, who are visiting sol 3 (earth). This effort is extremely expensive and involves spending trillions of dollars covertly to build spacecraft and weapons systems based on both advanced human originated technology and also technology from the reverse engineering of recovered alien vehicles.
Many people belive that securities fraud funds this effort. It sounds crazy, but, YES, building trillion dollar weapon systems and spaceships is at the core of the secrecy cult. Nothing else makes sense. What else could possibly require siphoning trillions out of the US economy? Many many authors are written on the subject and it is most definitely NOT a joke. Yes, Bill, lets ask the awkward questions.
Is there a secret space program funded via securities fraud? Have we received help from ET visitors?
One man who asked the awkward question was Congressman Steve Schiff of New Mexico. He asked the Congressional General Accounting Office to inquire about the alleged Roswell alien craft recovery. He got the USAF to give us a third story – (first was a disc, second a weather baloon and third was project mogul) This all took place in the mid 90's.
He was only about 50 yrs old when he caught agressive skin cancer. He resigned from congress and was dead soon after. He was 51.
- aTomsLife
I disagree that Mr. Lofren's article provokes apathy. It sheds light on the duopoly that is the two-party system and encourages voters to seek an alternative, namely a more libertarian, decentralized form of government.
"Overwhelming Congressional skepticism" to Syria included party-line Democrats as well: Unlike the usual D vs. R bickering, it was D's and R's forced to contradict the military industrial complex. It was a powerful moment.
Syria proved the American people - and perhaps only the American people - are capable of muzzling the Deep State. The only reason we didn't intervene there was because constituencies throughout the country stood united, not because of potential international condemnation. The irony of Putin's victory is that he achieved it because he had the backing of the American people. He morphed into our de-facto representative.
Even for the plutocrats, Putin represented the the lesser of two evils. It would have been a catastrophic loss of face to have to admit that D.C. remains beholden to the American people when, united, we're unwilling to follow the script.
Until there's meaningful campaign finance reform, "it really doesn't matter who's in charge." That's the simple truth. But it's a reason to become more engaged in politics, not less.
- J Timothy
One of the problems with dealing with the intelligence services is that they have people embeded within the media to get their point of view across. So, when Moyers talks about asking "Awkward Questions" he underestimates how difficult this is.
Ed Bernays and Walter Lippman were the gentleman geniuses who showed us that marketing and propaganda could be used to manage public opinion without limits.
Yes, lets ask the awkward questions. What is so important to the military-industrial-complex that it needs to siphon, literally, trillions of dollars out of the US economy?
One man asked an awkward question. His name was Congressman Steve Schiff. After he asked his question, he died of agressive skin cancer. He was 51 years old. Sure. It cold have been coincidence. But he was the only one asking awkward questions at the time and he was the only one who got agressive skin cancer. Meanwhile, the CIA's top spooks like George HW Bush and Kissinger are still alive into their 90's. Go figure.
- http://daybrown.org Dale H. (Day) Brown
Mother Nature bats last. When we look at the list of empires crashed because bad weather ruined crops, we see it includes all of them. People will put up with appalling corruption- until they are hungry. The Deep State has not picked up on the risk of unusual weather on agriculture, altho the price of crop insurance rose dramatically. Agribusiness will do fine with govt checks, but people cant eat insurance.
Part of the problem is that ag policy is set to reduce the cost of the hobby operations of politicians, like Bush's ranch, but failing to support the backbone of American agriculture, the family farm. The average age of farmers now is over 60, and because of land speculation by friends of elected representatives, the next generation cant afford to buy farms. The result is land owned by absent aristocracy and worked by men whose only interest is their immediate benefit and not the condition of land to be inherited by sons.
Another of the many reasons we need a Gnu Party not run by lawyers.
- Thomas Milligan
Can't blame you for feeling ripped off. You have been. We all have been, except for those in the very top income brackets. Lofgren does a pretty good job of detailing the forces that have perpetrated the heist. I've come to call it The Money; it includes the actors Lofgren details, plus billionaire types like the Koch brothers and Richard Mellon Scaife, plus the mainstream media (even much of PBS, unfortunately), which has become the Ministry of Propaganda for The Money. All Is Well. The USA Is Number 1. The Government Is Keeping Us Safe from Terrorism. Buy More Stuff. Whistleblowers Are Traitors. The Economy Is Recovering. Buy More Stuff. If Things Aren't Getting Better for You It's Because You're a Loser. So Buy More Stuff.
Don't romanticize the '50's too much. The discontent that exploded in the 60's was just under the surface even then. To the extent that it was "better" then it was because the prosperity of the nation *was* more broadly shared. A single "breadwinner" (usually Dad) could feed a family, with enough left over to save for old age, and Mom was available to nurture the kids. Do you know *any* families for whom that could be true today? And the mainstream media was populated by actual journalists rather than mouthpieces for The Money who look good in suits and understand what their owners want said. Bill Moyers, obviously, is an exception to this rule. One of the few.
I'm surprised you're not angry. You have every reason to be.
- Thomas Milligan
Mr. Lofgren does a pretty good job of detailing the forces that have perpetrated the sad parody of self-government into which our nation has devolved, but he left out a couple. I've come to calling the whole thing "The Money." It includes the actors Lofgren details, plus billionaire types like Scaife and the Koch brothers, plus the mainstream media (even much of PBS, unfortunately), which has become the Ministry of Propaganda for The Money and the so-called "Washington Consensus." Where once we had journalists, now we have (with the almost-sole exception of Bill Moyers) pretty people who look good in suits and like to be on TV, reading the scripts they're given.
- Anonymous
Well, that's rather a 'rose colored glasses' view of the Tea Party given their current platform position. While I agree there are some redeeming qualities – not because I deem them to be but because they do contribute to the discussion – But, by-n-large the solutions offered by the Tea Party platform will only serve to weaken any hopes of salvaging the Democracy. One such example is this meme that 'all Govt. is bad' which only someone disingenuous would suggest does not prominently inhabit the TP. Another would be the position on so called 'entitlements'. Yet another would be the Tea Party backing of the likes of Ted Cruz or Rand Paul who adopt a position on health care that is antithetical toward a robust Democracy. (And spare me the notion that private enterprise provides better health care etc. – it's simply untrue and there's no evidence to support these fictions.).
One has to examine a few things about the Tea Party – It is quite clear why individuals such as the Koch brothers have gone to great lengths to fund the Tea Party because it is the entrenched Plutocrats and Corporate elite who benefit the most from a weakened Govt. Many TP members see their quality of life eroding and have chosen to go after the wrong entity why? Well, those reasons are numerous – for some it is fear, for others racism, others an inability to grasp the weight of their decisions, etc. and Irrespective of their reasons the actions of the party, quite ironically, will only strengthen the grasp of the very problems you wish to suggest they will address. While a nice sentiment to feel the Tea Party could work with others the reality is much different.
- Anonymous
Wow, how do you create such a canvas of revisionist history? I also found it quite tragic that you espouse 'we need to stop this R vs L' dichotomy but you make every effort to assault the left – exclusively. While that would be with merit if it were true (indeed both parties have played a role in where we now sit) it becomes quite another matter when viewed against, oh idk, the backdrop of reality. A.) Historically it is regulation that keeps corporate interests in check and deregulation promotes the 'crony capitalism' you mention. It's hysterical to assume the inverse. B.) Progressive policies have, again in reality, led to the greatest moments of growth and prosperity in this country. I"m sorry you don't believe those facts. And, why didn't you mention the inequality gap on steroids since Reagan? or the Bush tax cuts that benefitted the richest Americans? Or the subsidization of big pharma. and big oil? Both parties have no interest in representing people without money and every incentive not to. But, don't prattle on this nonsense about the dangers of progressivism. it's ill-thought and smells of ideological belief hungering to trump facts and history; it smells.
- Anonymous
It is quite disheartening and the road forward most uncertain. I'm fairly confident those you allude to will not act from a position of reason and evidence that is fact based. I cannot, for the life of me, imagine circumstances in which those guided by fantasy, belief, and hate (one or all) will shift ideological positions and address the problems that inhabit this country by the corporate state. Individuals like Ted Cruz, Jamie Dimon (more subtly), the Koch brothers are gifted in their cunning ability to take advantage of these, what Thom Hartmann calls 'low information voters' – I've little reason for optimism and plenty of evidence for pessimism without hope.
- Anonymous
After reading this all I can say God help us. I think I can speak for millions of Americans who grew up in a different country. We use to believe that hard work, play by the rules and everything would work out for the Middleclass American. All could share in the American dream. Those beliefs are not what I hear anymore. Apathy and fear are rampant..I fear for the country my children with inherit.
- fenway67
yeah, i don't think that is his main point. it's the corporations and the banks that have infiltrated and that is the fault of both sides of the aisle. The author notes that the bipartisan divide is mostly noise obscuring the bigger picture.
- fenway67
i am hopeful that firstlook.org will be a source of honest journalism. Scahill, Poitras, Greenwald and Taibbi are real journalists working toward finding the truth.
- Anonymous
Wars forced us into debt slavery to the Big banks that financed them, thus we are slaved to the NWO BANKS and corporations Federal Reserve Banks buys and owns most of our debt, they are international now We are controlled by the bankers and the secret NWO financial network running the governments of the world. Everything trickles down from these taskmasters. Follow the money and everything is controlled by where it leads. Globalization, one financial system running the world into their vision of one world government controlled by their big money. They been ruling us for a long time now. CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM would fix us election process and would scare them knowing they can't put their bag men in office anymore.
- Anonymous
So you believe the blame for big government lies only with the liberals? Give me a break. Here are just four Presidents who expanded Government. They are named Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Bush. Flaming liberals to you I would assume.
- John Gregor
Looking forward to odering some of those books. Have read all Foucault's books. The author wrote quite a nice essay about contemporay American politics. Our majot export seems to be Dollars, like manure they have some value, but I imagine alot of the people who are getting them are not entirely happy
- Anonymous
I saw Mike on c-span Sunday and enjoyed his comments, and now reading this piece I have trouble with a GOP former congressional analysis troubled about how the govt is working or not working beginning in 2009.
As with many of former GOP legislators or analysts never do they dig deeper into the underlying problems that cause the congress to not work. Mentioning the Deep State reminds me of Washington Post investigation exposing the 2nd govt in DC. It's where all the retired legislators or lost elections legislators, the congressional staff, the retired military generals go. They pop up in media (tv, radio, newspapers) spewing out a talking point for their respective 2nd govt think tank in DC. C-span is a major platform that they use, and 99% of them promote some corporation dealing with the 1st govt.
Too bad we don't see the name tags of the corporations they represent. Now that we have citizens united we're back into the age of the Robber Barons.
- Andrew Kloak
This insightful essay shows that Silicon Valley is not be what it claims to be. Neither is Wall Street or the massive build-up of federal government power around Washington, D.C.
The article also alludes to the notion that these companies in Silicon Valley are waking and trying to resist Deep State regime. California can't save American society. We are only 12% of the entire population. Plus, they don't want to, they have to answer to shareholders. Profit is the highest good for companies and government. They want influence and money.
All this is like marionette theatre. James Clapper from the NSA used misdirection when reporters started to zero-in on the scale of the deception and breach of trust last Fall. Enormous change is just ahead but not without enormous turmoil. People intuitively know that national security and corporate power are worn out dogmas.
There is an urgency to all this. Many of these people in these positions of power have no soul. It doesn't have to be this way, it just is. I think they want it this bad because they profit and garner influence when it is this ineffectual.
The biggest changes are within anyway. We have to go deeper in ourselves. That shift in consciousness is already underway. The confluence of forces will sweep away these external constructs. The hidden factors not discussed in the article are the unconscious forces (emotion). Once people are more aware of the light and darkness in themselves things will open up. There is dynamic tension (a good thing) in each person. Self-awareness, integrity and connection to others will change everything.
This article makes interesting connections to something that is hidden in
plain sight. It will change.- richard anderson
I have been giving the political system another chance since Vietnam. Each time we have an election I hear some good things. But when these people are in office they change. When Ralph Nader ran for office he was kept out by various means and not allowed to debate. The system is rigged. This talk of voting for the right person is not going to cut it. With the problems this deep and the protection that has been set up to keep this system in place there is NOT a way to change it. In other words voting will not work. Something more is needed. Demonstrations don't work either. Just look at how long the Vietnam war was protested and when Bush stumped for invasion of Iraq. They didn't care. Resistance may be the answer.
- Anonymous
Rothschild family made their banking trillions beginning from financing Napoleon's wars up until now. Their family owns media houses, governments, etc and their influence knows no bounds. You will never see their family listed on Forbes richest people lists because they own the media and do not want to see their names or advertise their wealth. The Bankers truly own the world and War debt was the fastest way to do it.
- Anonymous
lol. good comment and link.
I will be interested in seeing what First Look does, but I really don't trust the bazillionaire who is starting it up – or at least his motives. Once a plutocrat, always a plutocrat. I predict it will start like Arianna Huffington's HuffPo, initially game changing and valuable, then slowly just another click generating tabloid profit machine with a bubble like mentality forced on contributers, moderators and commentors alike. Time will tell.
- Ellie
We have all this information, but nothing ever comes of it! No one goes to jail The laws are changed to help the criminals . We still have a two party system which is a joke. Unless people are hungry and cold and willing to die for a cause nothing is going to change in this country.
- J.G. Sandom
We have become almost as much a plutocracy as our former Cold War nemesis, Russia. Tech, Big Oil and Wall Street oligarchs, combined with the military-industrial complex (which Eisenhower tried to warn us against) collude (in spirit, if not in actual boardrooms) to keep the people's power in check via libertarian deregulation, union-busting, Citizens United (and other activist SCOTUS rulings), privatization of the Intelligence Community (IC), the opiate of digital media that pushes the idolatry of money & all things celebrity to distract us, and our collective fear of terrorism (hence our perpetual war footing). This is what my forthcoming novel, 404, is all about-not just how IP tech is invading our lives, but how this invasion is a metaphor for the larger invasion. (HAL2, in my book, IS what Mike Lofgren calls the Deep State.) Wake up, America! Our country is being stolen from us in plain sight. Thank you Bill Moyers, and thank you Mike Lofgren for helping to alert the American public. You are 21st century Paul Reveres! Al Qaeda is less of a threat to America because of some future possible terrorist threat, and more because the collective American fear it engenders helps the Deep State sink its claws more effectively into our national flesh.
- Anonymous
What rings clear is we now have a non-elected government operating outside our constitutional government and is purposely gridlocked. Our government and judicial system have been hijacked and steps must be taken to remove Big Hidden money that is controlling our constitutional government. Great interview Bill, thanks as always!
- Jack Wolf
Mike forgot something. There is a simple fact that rules the deep state, the reformists, and the declinests, whether they accept it or not: Natural Law. Abrupt climate change can not be controlled now. To suggest that any of these groups are in control or have the ability to make substantial change belies what is really going on. From now on, all these groups can only react and as far as I can tell, today will be the best day of the rest of our lives. It's all downhill from here and there is irreversible.
- Thomas Milligan
Oh, I know about those guys and I love what they do. The trouble is, somehow *their* work doesn't, as a rule, get picked up, amplified and developed in the mass media the way, say "Watergate" was back when we had real journalists. Meanwhile every load of BS that comes out of the Heritage Foundation, Cato et. al. somehow becomes received wisdom. I'm also a bit concerned that by going off on their own they're setting themselves up to be marginalized and ignored. Trees may fall, but very few people will hear them.
- Thomas Milligan
Somehow your response above… to *my* response… to your original post… got posted under a *separate* post I offered… scroll down far enough, you'll find your original post & my response.
Can't blame you for wanting to shield your children. The thing is, you can't, neither from the anger nor from global climate change. I have grandchildren and grieve when I look at them for the world they're apparently going to inhabit.
One last thing: it's possible… theoretically at least… to have anger without hatred. Anger at what's been done can be a spur to action… and effective action could be taken while still treating the perpetrators with the compassion we know all sentient beings deserve. I'm not sure *I* could manage it because truth to tell I'm not a very good Christian… or Buddhist either… but it's at least theoretically possible.
- Thomas Milligan
Good point about our old nemesis, The Evil Empire.
I always found it ironic that as the Soviet Union was collapsing, the United States was moving toward one-party rule. You can write the Nov. 5 headline right now: "Republocrats Win Yet Again!"
- fenway67
Agreed, the MSM has a vested interest in having their product on the shelf at eye-level and it's hard for the little guy to buy space in this market. I'll be doing my part by re-posting and tweeting important stories that they cover and I just hope the quality will get them noticed. I'm sure the smear campaign against them will begin soon.
- fenway67
I wasn't aware of his motives beyond providing a platform for real journalists. What have you heard? I am hopeful that the high quality work of the people he has hired so far will keep it in the same company as the Moyers people.
- Kenneth Killiany
This is an issue that concerns me greatly actually. Both sides have adopted policies that have fed it. I find it interesting that you mention Allen Drury, who was my uncle. Al was a dogged reporter, uncovering, in his day, the Manhattan Project, which he did not report on because of World War II. Should he have? He never doubted his judgment. However, he was very concerned about how the State just grew and operated on its won. You can see mentions of it in ADVISE AND CONSENT and MARK COFFIN, where he discusses the whole public-private daisy chain and how irresponsible it is. It's true, you can't get drama out of it, but he mentions it, but in PENTAGON, he wrote a whole book about a bureaucracy can be diverted from what it is meant to do by concerns for its own prerogatives. A&C and MARK COFFIN have just been re-released, and PENTAGON will follow next year. This kind of reporting in your article is the kind he admired and it is a great service.
- freelance-writer
A.k.a.:Ukraine 2014. Though there are many factors and stake-holders at work in the Ukraine issue, it behooves the citizenry of all western nations tainted by the same `deep-state' tyranny to bear witness. It will take bricks against bullets to resolve this global crisis once and for ever.
- Mary Brown
The only terrorists we have to face in the USA are our own government and the ones that government is purposely importing to continue their reign of fear. Problem is a large part of America is now well armed and a terrorist would die rather quickly long before any government police forces arrives.
- Len
Most of us frogs are in a pot of water that is getting hotter and hotter and we don't feel it. As quoted from this essay "After
a while, a functionary of the state begins to hear things that, in another
context, would be quite remarkable, or at least noteworthy, and yet that simply
bounce off one's consciousness like pebbles off steel plate". Replace "a functionary of the state" with "we the people".This essay was terrific.
- Anonymous
I am worried that the boiling pot will lead to the elimination of Social Security. For years now politicians been saying it will end to each generation. When it does, a very high percentage of Americans will be at poverty level. I don't want to be living in American cities when that happens, crime and robberies will be common place.
- Anonymous
Yes, this is not a new development… The funny thing is that Bill Moyers' Iran-Contra era expose entitled "The Secret Government" actually covers this subject better than the piece we are commenting on. And iirc, he interviews Peter Dale Scott about the CIA in that report…
- Anonymous
There is a world of difference between bailouts and nationalization. I cannot begin to quantify the folly of calling this system "Marxist" when the party on the left of the two party system has moved so far to the right as to make Eisenhower seem like Trotsky by comparison.
- Anonymous
For Gods sake, not this again. What Banking family who made the bulk of their fortune from War debt and being worth $500 Trillion dollars are you referring to? Everybody is afraid to print anything on these influential banking members. Their influence in this world has no bounds. As we all know Bankers always protect their money and are devising new ways to make more money. If you naively think that Bankers in this world are Godly benevolent people, you better look around the state of the world again and formulate a revised opinion. but there you go, I got my opinion and you have yours and we will respectfully leave it as that. Thanks for your comment!
- Anonymous
Last time I looked capitalism is buying and bought our election process. In fact, in the past the main focus of our government has been on business priorities and concerns. Doesn't look anything as Marxism to me.
- Jimmy Solomon
I read this article and watched your interview. Both are most enlightened. What happened, however, on the eleventh day of the ninth month thirteen years ago was clearly a result of this deep state and it is too bad you won't recognize this glaring example of the corruption of which you write.
- Anonymous
"the party on the left of the two party system"
There is little or no difference between the two faces of the party of state power. They use different words, and then enact the same policies.
Politics is about power, nothing more. There is no "left" or "right", only power.
- Antonio Germano
Again, what filibusters? You have provided no examples. Except for the (unfortunately) pathetic attempts of Cruz, Paul and Lee to derail Obamacare and the recent debt ceiling/government shutdown (I wish) affair, where has there been any effective Republican opposition to any of Obama's agenda?
You are typical of the person who blames one side for our problems, when it's both sides (i.e., the government) that is the problem. Both sides are playing their respective constituencies like a Stradivarius. get over your obsession with partisanship and see the real issue – the whole system is corrupt and needs to be abolished.
Your pining for 'majority rules' is a recipe for tyranny. The filibuster rules were put into place to prevent temporary majorities from steam-rolling temporary minorities. I think it should be even harder to pass laws, not easier, so mischief is avoided.
I repeat – the State is the enemy of us all. get over blaming one side or the other. You are being played.- Anonymous
amazing that such a powerful article was written. too bad its several years too late, and ever so slightly off the mark. you need to let go of the rhetoric of bipartisanship. the DNC and GOP establishments are both operating on the same basic policies. while they offer crumbs to their bases, they are both pushing the agenda of the deep state.they are both to blame, and until people declare that both have no clothes, the powers behind the curtain will continue to rule.
- Anonymous
Thanks, well said.
There's also the "Shallow State" of American campaign consultants like David Axelrod and Mark Penn who make big money in places like Ukraine and Georgia because the locals assume they wield influence over their clients in Washington. If American foreign policy became less aggressive, foreigners wouldn't pay them so much money:
- Auntie Analogue
"F]inancialization, outsourcing, privatization, deregulation and the commodifying of labor."
Yes, "commodifying of labor" thanks to Teddyquiddick pushing the 1965 Hart-Cellers act that began the importation of million Third World unskilled laborers per year, thanks also to the Deep State paralyzing all efforts of us, the People, to force our so-called "representatives" to close, fortify, and defend our borders – to stop the massive flow of scores of millions of illegal immigrants. Immigration has done more to stagnate and reduce Americans' wages and to destroy what had been our historically unprecedented middle class affluence and economic-political power.
Objective One for those of us who would dismantle the Deep State and restore our democracy is obvious: Stop All Immigration. Accomplish this by these measures: one, end birthright citizenship (and thus also end birth tourism); two, abolish State Department power to import refugees and government funding of NGO's that "resettle" refugees; deport all illegal aliens; impose massive, draconian fines on employers that hire illegal alien labor. Why are these measures Objective One? Simple: when we allow our Dear Rulers to displace and dispossess us on our own soil, we forfeit – we surrender – our power to control our representatives and their appointees and their wealth transfer from ourselves to foreigners.- Mil
This is just a small list. But it at least provides some of the examples you are asking to see.
http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/recent-business/bills-blocked-by-republican-filibusters
- rgrisham
This is not a revelation. Noam Chomsky has been pointing this out clearly for the past 40 years… There a couple public documents that might help explain to the educated class exactly what has been going in the U.S. for the past 40 years… The Powell Memo written by Lewis Powell in 71 and the Crisis of Democracy a document publicly published by the Trilateral Commission in the mid 70's these are both damning omissions by powerful groups that control both the business world and governments at all levels of governance. These two documents that we know about are internal look at the dogma of the ruling class.. Neo Liberalism is the term they used but it sure aint new and it sure aint liberal. It just another way for the ruling class to re-institute Feudalism.
- Anonymous
What you say is essentially true. Fascism by definition is the merger of corporations and the military. Another amusing quote: "A capitalist will sell you the rope you hang him with." Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
These Deep State proponents will succeed in fully displaying their stupidity when the global environment collapses under the weight and consequence of their actions and humanity becomes extinct. In the meantime, they will be having fun and braying like jackasses as they descend into the abyss.
- Anonymous
What about the level of organization required to create the Trilateral Commission and its formal takeover of the US executive branch when Carter took office? The majority of the cabinet (all but one) were Trilateralists in the newly created group of only 300 worldwide members. Trilateralists were placed in high level international corporate and political positions and this paradigm holds today. Scholars Antony Sutton and Patrick Wood wrote extensively on this international power dynamic with its influence now extending to every part of the globe. It was Trilateralist Larry Summers, former US Secretary of Treasury and Goldman Sachs executive, who was sent to Russia when it's economy imploded to advise Putin on how to privatize the Russian peoples' state owned assets leading the to rise of eight powerful oligarchs with internationalist sensibilities, a very deliberate centralization of capital and a means to control Russian political power players. From the beginning of the transfer of the US manufacturing sector to China, it became Brzezinski's model Technocracy, Brzezinski being the a founder of the Trilateralists, Carter's National Security Adviser, and author of The Grand Chessboard. (reference: Patrick Wood's augustforecast.com) These actions and the concomitant level of organization goes beyond the Deep State model.
- Anonymous
.. if there were no abuses by the IRS, then why did IRS official Lois Lerner plead the fifth ? If my boss asked me to explain possible abuses of power at my job and I pleaded the fifth, my new office would be on the curb.
- Anonymous
The meetings happen in Rancho Mirage and other places for Koch Brothers, and ALEC, etc. They are the ones paying the Pols and they definitely meet and plan conspiracies to disenfranchise voters. And, William Pepper wrote a book that reveals the conspiracies within those security agencies that control pols. It is great the Lofgren is talking about the Deep State. But, to deny the conspiracies within it is naive. The crashing of the Obama garden party by Robert Gates associates is a case in point. The Supreme Court ultimately is the last point of call to stop this Deep State within all the branches. They have judicial oversight, and they are not using it.
- scratphd
The great swamp philosopher Pogo got it right. "I have meet the enemy and he is us."
A complacent America.- Christanne
Lofgren: What America lacks is a figure with the serene self-confidence to tell us that the twin idols of national security and corporate power are outworn dogmas that have nothing more to offer us. Thus disenthralled, the people themselves will unravel the Deep State with surprising speed.
This essay echoes Ivan Illich's "Tools for Convivality," which, although written in the '70s is even more applicable today. This is not new. Lofgren is an important wedge to cauterize the deep state and dispell delusions of unending "progress." However, I don't see any evidence for his assertion that the people themselves will unravel the Deep State. What we've done so far is just buy a new toy, both literally and figuratively, even when so many of us are going hungry.
- Anonymous
Excellent essay. A very good (semi-) insider's look at happenings within the Beltway. However, my instinct tells me that the real nexus of power doesn't lie there, but that the Deep State operatives are allowed to continue their game-playing at public expense in order to serve a larger agenda–the ultimate bankrupting of the US and the ushering in of a new world order which has been in the making for centuries by the real powers-that-be. Uber-conspiratorial? Maybe, but I just can't shake the feeling.
- The One
There is no doubt that the great american experiment has ended in ruin. There is hope on the horizon though. Due to technological progression and its rapid increase in power, the very fabric of society will change. Our social and economic models must change radically due to technological improvements. There is no end in sight to the technological pace we have been blazing at, and if there is an end it seems to be distant. The tremendous benefits of creative AI and the automation of white and blue collar workers must be built into a new social and economic model in which the benefits are distributed evenly and equally among the peoples of planet earth. Even now, if we used our technology wisely, we could unshackle large swaths of the labor markets with automated robots.
The current state of unimaginable corruption which is inflicting the world, not just the US, is a dying last grasp for air as the oligarchies face a new powerful threat, the connection of all things. The internet has the power to upend these corrupt power structures which lie at the heart of society, and thus at the heart of every human life on this planet. Our current economic model is not situated in reality. I can't say if the market will be up or down tomorrow, but what I know for certain is that earth is 196.9 million square miles. Which is a finite space. Not a good place for an economic model which requires economic expansion for survival. The labor markets will be greatly dis-stressed due to technological displacement. The current scientific revolution is unlike any that has ever happened on the surface of this planet. Even highly skilled workers such as surgeons have the capacity to be replaced by highly advanced robots specializing in surgery. People will see awaken to the fact that this "annoying high unemployment" is actually the new normal and will only get worse. This REQUIRES a new economic model.
If a business refused to integrate their business with the latest automation technology, a rival that had enough foresight to not oversee this would drive his competitor out of business. Then, in our current economic model, that rival that just won the market would reap all the rewards. BUT, it will also be in the best interest of that company, if in some new economic manner, a portion of those profits would go into a general citizens fund which would provide all humans with a basic income. This type of model will be absolutely necessary due to mass unemployment. This leaves the motive for profit intact which also leads a motive for innovation, creation, and competition that humans need. With scarcity gone, and universal income for all, the future will look very very bright for our young human species. The seas of interstellar space beckon.
- Anonymous
"…another thing" – yup – if they changed the rule so they could get what they claimed was their agenda passed, the Reps might have been able to do the same – however the Reps could do that anyway themselves if they regained power –
In any case, what does that say about a Party that would refuse to advance a decent agenda just so the other party couldn't advance its own at another date – in essence, cutting off our noses to spite the Reps face – they could have done what they knew we sent them there to do, and they refused, hiding behind rules they could have changed – more and more folks are waking up …
ISTM it oughta be obvious by now that this "struggle" between the Reps and the Dems isn't about principle or ideology and it certainly isn't about representing us – it is about who gets to be in charge of handing out the perks and who gets the perks – those in power are the ones who get both ….
- Charles Shaver
Nice to keep learning of a plethora of ambiguous symptoms but, short of too costly general strikes or domestic insurrection, only voting proved corrupt politicians of both major parties out of high office every other November will eventually restore legal functionality to the U.S. Government. So, vote in every general election and vote against those who stray. 'How to know' one might ask? Simply vote 'out with the old; in with the new,' every time, until we have the kind of America the Founders prescribed in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution.
- Anonymous
It only depends on your definition of "the US." Yes, a panel of CEOs famously declined Ralph Nader's invitation to join him in the Pledge of Allegiance, but in the State Department memo that outlined the policy of containment of the USSR, George Kennan said the vast wealth disparity between the US and the rest of the world must be maintained, while civil rights and democracy could be neglected.
By then, the post-World War One idealists who'd joined calls for socialism and one-world government, to prevent another such catastrophe, had seen things differently once Russia turned Eastrrn Europe into a barricade against further invasions from the West. They could not bring themselves to reb against their banker fathers, but they still believed in a one-world government – it would simply be the government of the United States. The entire world would be brought into the economc system we ran, no matter what citizens and their elected governments wanted.
During the Cold War, NATO was used to bring European intelligence agencies and militaries under domnance by the CIA and the Pentagon. Putting ordnance, money and men in place to resist a Soviet takeover made perfect sense, but it operated in peacetime to keep left-wingers out of Continental governments. We overthrew an Italian government, for example. Not by ourselves, of course: the secret "stay-behind" troops were nitorious right-wing fanatics, who could be trusted to carry out their missions regardless of law, Constitutionality or morality. False-flag shootings and bombings in public squares and supermarkets killed many innocent civilians and were blamed on leftist radical groups which had been thoroughly penetrated already anyway. This was to win public support for stricter security policies and, perhaps, punish citizens for voting in liberal-to-left governments. This was admitted in the Italian parliament by the Prime Minister in 1990. Operation GLADIO, as it was called, involved every NATO country. Investigations were promised, but were aborted or came to mothing.
This is what Putin knows will happen if Ukraine joins NATO, for instance, so don't expect him to take it lying down. He operates a Russian version.
In the US, a group of Wall Street financiers discussed literally overthrowing FDR in order to end the New Deal regulatory state, but didn't get past the talking stage. The Senate held hearings but J. Edgar Hoover declined to investigate becayse "no crime was committed." This is the same FBI director who opened pressure dossiers on citizens who carried protest signs or wrote letters to newspapers or the government opposing our war policies, and tried to get Martin Luthed King to commit suicide.
Note the secrecy surrounding current trade-agreement negotiations, and accompanying high security. This dates back to the fiaco of the world trade talks in Seattle some years ago, when street protests neatly brought them to a halt. An Italian citizen was killed during protests against trade talks in Genoa yeats later.
- Anonymous
This was a superb essay–one I have been awaiting for years. One minor addition: there is another non DOD component to the aforementioned group, which is DOE. Admittedly,
it's rather easy to forget about them–but one should not. Ever.- Anonymous
But I really wonder if voting is a sufficient tool for the citizenry to tell the government what it thinks.
Elections are not very frequent, they are deeply manipulated by complex "strategists" (look at the connection between the now-slowly-debunked gay marriage referenda and the re-election of Bush Jr).
Though I find it tedious and at times inefficient I wouldn't mind being part of a citizenry like France that literally shuts the country down until the government says "uncle".- Anonymous
I believe the fourth estate and the way the US government interacts with it have a lot to do with the opacity of the veil I find floating between myself and whatever happens inside the beltway.
The US government keeps journalists begging for the tiniest crumbs. No one is willing to leak anything for fear of being caught.
When I asked a friend in the diplomatic corps what was the most striking about his stint in DC he said the depth at which government officials changed with each new administration compared to other countries. DC's moving business is booming beyond anything imaginable. This is also a tidy way to keep a tight grip on "messaging" – a skill each administration seems to get better and better at.
There is a reason wikileaks has emerged and parody has replaced the stale format of the evening news.
- Charles Shaver
Voting is still an effective tool. Unfortunately, statistically, a majority of manipulated voters will only dirty their hands to install and re-install soluble Democrats and Republicans when seeking water tight integrity; insane, by Einstein's definition. Now is well past the best time to make some real repairs but, perhaps, not yet too late to save a sinking ship. And, shutting the engine down won't plug the leaks.
- Pat Kittle
We Americans are already plenty overcrowded, but Israel lobby billionaires want open borders and they've paid big bucks to both Republicans & Democrats. So open borders and endless population growth it is, ecological sustainability be damned.
And don't give me that "anti-Semitic" hooey, I'm just stating facts.
Zuckerberg, Bloomberg, Soros, Gelbaum, Adelson, etc., etc., Israel lobby, all of them.
No serious discussion of the "deep state" would ignore that elephant in the living room.
- Anonymous
This is not a valid critique. The Deep State serves organized wealth and works to further increase inequality and social stratification. Thus the Deep State represents entrenched right-wing power. It is a matter of state capture. Both parties support this consensus and are thus supremely conservative. The same goes for the media which is owned by these same centers of organized wealth.
- Matt P.
It's not a matter of keeping one's mouth shut, but actions speak louder than words. Being angry and contentious all the time is not the same as being productive about the issues you believe in. Whenever I see an inequality in the street, on the subway, or at a party I react. I stand up for the person, I intervene and get involved. The rest of the time I do keep my mouth shut because there's nothing to say. It doesn't help anyone to spread unhappiness around. In fact it drains your energy so you're not ready or as effective for the next opportunity.
- Sean Kurnow
I get a laugh at people who yell, whine and complain about politicians and party politics….It's like yelling at a ventriloquist dummy instead of the person controlling it. America became a plutocracy in 1913 when the Federal Reserve was created. Since then, we all know that special interest groups control almost every aspect of government policy.
- Anonymous
I will assume you simply did not understand what I wrote or what 'slouching' wrote – ironic eh?
Lets remove Thom Hartmann from the equation, as it seems to be where you flew off the rails…what then is your defense of the idiots we allude to?- Anonymous
I well understand the argument about brainwashing – have heard it a gazillion times ….
The "idiots" you refer to – who are these folk? And while the corp media was brainwashing them, what were the rest of us doing? Sitting on our hands?
- Bill Wesley
well for once I have no comment, its not required in that the writer has made the case with expert precision, I find no flaws, no omissions, no theory or dogma obstructing the writers view. Its nice to see such well presented intellectual compitance, it allows me to feel relief, I can take a break since others are seen to be on the ball
- FroboseTF
Charles:
Voting used to be an effective tool. Unfortunately with the advent of "Electronic Voting Machines" which must be "Programmed", and leave no paper trail to allow a recount; I fear that if the truth be known our elections are probably rigged on a regular basis to reflect the will of those in actual power now.I believe it was Joseph Stalin who said "It's not who casts the votes that's important. It's who counts them.
- Anonymous
Actually, it was a Mossad (Israeli Intel)/US Intel op. US organized it and funded the Al Qaeda end of it via Paki intel officer General Mahmoud Ahmed, while the Mossad prepped the US targets and ran the anthrax mail op. I'm not sure that Mossad didn't dream it up in the first place, but, whatever the details, Al Qaeda was definitely just a bit player in the op with the real culprits being our own fearless leaders.
- Reuben_the_Red
Winner-takes-all elections (as opposed to proportional representation) and the Electoral College are inherently undemocratic and present the illusion of voter participation without the danger of undue voter influence.
- Reuben_the_Red
Excellent discussion of the intersection of money, power, and early 21st century technology in the US today. Food for thought, especially paired with Moyer's recent documentary about ALEC.
One caveat: Paragraph 21 starts out saying, "the Deep State is so heavily entrenched, so well protected by
surveillance, firepower, money and its ability to co-opt resistance that
it is almost impervious to change," but in paragraph 22, "there are signs of resistance to the Deep State and its demands." Paragraph 21 has already made the case that resistance is irrelevant and impotent in the face of the Deep State apparatus, power/wealth reserves, and democracy-subverting methodology. And that's probably true. There may be no way to actually extricate the Deep State from The Superficial State.We are left in the final few paragraphs with a series of reasons that the Deep State might reverse course voluntarily, or unravel of its own accord, but in the end what we really need is "a figure with the serene self-confidence to tell
us that the twin idols of national security and corporate power are
outworn dogmas that have nothing more to offer us": in other words, some kind of charismatic, messianic Jesus-person, to save us from ourselves. I don't object to the author trying to end with a hopeful note of optimism, but how would this person reach us with that message? Are there not already a host of people who have been saying exactly that for decades, from Noam Chomsky to Angela Davis, from Daniel Quinn to Arundhati Roy, from Mark Twain to John Lennon? Have we not managed to ignore and disregard a notable and widely-published list of people trying to tell us that national security and corporate power are outworn dogmas that do nothing to elevate humanity nor the human condition?"Thus disenthralled,
the people themselves will unravel the Deep State with surprising speed." It seems clear that we will be forever enthralled with our credit scores and our televised sporting events and other televised virtual realities until the government of the US actually collapses due to a variety of currently known and unknown factors (economic, ecological, etc). And that's not gonna be pretty either. And even then there is the further possibility that in such an event of complete destabilization (not unthinkable, has happened throughout history, around the world), the Deep State could become simply The State.- Reuben_the_Red
Agreed. Presumably there is no incentive in the Deep State to undermine the omnipotence of the Deep State.
There are ways to increase voter participation (non-participation fines and penalties as I understand Australians are subject to; make voting day a federal holiday or even better a three-day weekend; give the right to vote back to felons and inmates alike; etc.) but wouldn't we still be left to choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee?
- Charles Shaver
I haven't voted for Tweedledee or Tweedledum for President since Ronald Reagan and, since learning of Gramm-Leach-Bliley in 2012, I don't vote for either for Congress. I'd rather take a chance on a third, fourth or fifth party unknown, a blank ballot or a write-in candidate than on another known destroyer from one of the two major parties. Participation alone is not enough; it has to be informed participation, referenced against the clear, plain and simple language of the U.S. Constitution. So, how do we get the word out?
- Reuben_the_Red
It would have been a very different election in 2012 if the Republican establishment and the corporate media machine had not colluded to rig the primaries so that Mitt Romney was the nominee, and not the one that the majority of voting Republicans wanted, Ron Paul, who ran on a platform that ironically appealed to many leftists, because of his insistence that foreign military interventions and US global military incursions cease immediately.
It's possible that the realistic threat of a viable third party candidate on the outer fringe of the left or the right could be enough to force that respective party to yield to those fringe demands, incorporating those demands into a mainstream platform, more or less like the Tea Party did with the Republican party in recent years, threatening to take their votes elsewhere.
At the same time, more Americans voted for left wing platforms than right wing platforms in 2000, but due to the winner-takes-all elections, we didn't get a government that was 5% Nader, 45% Gore, 45% Bush, majority leftist reflecting the vote. We got 100% Bush. We got corporate welfare, tax cuts for the uber wealthy which did not result in higher employment, we got two decade-long unprovoked foreign wars riddled with war crimes, and we got persistent recession. Some of these things, if not all of them, would not and could not have happened under a Nader/Gore-led government. The Deep State expanded massively with the Bush/Cheney administration's complicity. I wish that it was worthwhile to vote for third-party candidates, but we can expect them to receive no media coverage, few votes overall despite the possibly broad appeal of their platform, and in the end it would be irrelevant because of the Electoral College. If I live in Oregon and vote for Romney my vote is thrown away as surely as if I live in Utah and vote for Obama.
In answer to your question, how do we get the word out, I think the only answer is media ownership. Our lives are more consumed by media today than ever before in the history of the world, and all of the media is concentrated in fewer hands, with more consensus among those few hands, than ever before.
- Charles Shaver
It would be a very different election every time, and nation, if the majority would simply quit believing in the now defunct two-party system, corporate owned media and an extremist capitalist system that values the gains of the uber wealthy over the lives and limbs of workers and the poor. It's okay to question the status quo, ignore corporate media, do independent research, vote totally independent of family tradition and elect questionable strangers (as opposed to proved bipartisan failures) to defund the Deep State. Need a little more direction? Review the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution. It pretty well sums it all up in rather clear, plain and simple English, if you keep in mind that not just millionaires, billionaires and multi-national corporations (allegedly) are 'people.' Good conversation.
- jeffries
Mike Lofgren wrote the essay. Bill Moyers was allowed to interview him. PBS has its hands tied by the "deep state" too. If you doubt this talk ask PBS why they pulled the plug on the Koch Brothers expose.
- jeffries
The "deep state," like a parasite, will continue until its host is dead. My guess is they are in a state of panic-their host is on life support. The party is over- the rest of the world has had enough of the U.S. The petro dollar has been broken. The dollar will be dethroned as the world reserve currency and the torch will be passed to China no later than 2018. The players of the "deep state" will not be able to infiltrate and latch onto this new host and so they will fight to the death, more accurately our sons and daughters death, to keep the U.S. in its position. Resist war is all we can do and not buy into the steady stream of propaganda that will be bombarding us at every turn.
- Hatha Sunahara
I haven't read all 328 comments so far, but I just wonder if anybody has picked up on the reason the deep state has developed. I think it's development stems from the evolution of the United States from a Republic into an Empire. No empire can exist with restrictions on its power like those put on the United States by the Constitution. So, instead of discarding the Constitution, the United States was subsumed into an 'extra-constitutional government'. Of course, nobody bothered to tell the people of the United States that their power had been usurped by a lawless Imperial overlord. Responsibility for that egregious oversight can be laid to the mainstream media, which is owned by the owners of the extra-constitutional government. These are the global media corporations.
If you view politics this way, it explains a lot of things. Empire relies on it's military power and the acceptance of its money. Anyone who does not accept the empire's money generates hostility from the empire. The empire wages war without any declaration of war. The extra constitutional government allows that. The empire cannot tolerate privacy because that would allow people to plot against the empire without interference. So the empire puts everyone under surveillance. The empire cannot tolerate resistance or disobedience, so it develops a police state to instil fear and obedience in people. There are many many more examples of how empire rules America and usurps the US government–which exists for the people of the United States. Americans, and the people of the other countries in the world understand this viscerally, but are unable to express this in coherent thought because their language has been corrupted by the forces of empire. Mike Lofgren doesn't make this connection because iit violates the rules of political correctness. Everyone's career is tied to strict adherence to political correctness, and
- Anonymous
And many of the voters have been brainwashed by the 5 or 6 corporations that control the media. Fear entertainment.
- Anonymous
After I read Top Secret America I came to the conclusion that since 9/11 Homeland Security has become so incredibly humongous and so political it will keep growing until the US is bankrupt. The was the goal of Benladen. Europe did not fall for it be we did.
- Anonymous
Some contemporary books Blackwater, Bloodmoney, and especially Confessions if a Economic Hit Man. Also Top Secret America.
- Charles Shaver
I think a better name for 'Homeland Security' is 'elitist money addict insecurity.' And, it and treasonous corporate media propaganda will keep growing until we as an injured people finally 'Just say NO!' to the 'perpetraitors.' Thanks for commenting, above and below.
- Anonymous
There is a small very readable book written by John Perkins named Confessions of an Economic hit Man. This is the way the Corporatocracy has used the IMF and World Bank to take over the assets of less developed countries. And if their leaders do not agree to go along well then read what happens to them.
- Anonymous
In many states felons are legally allowed to vote if they have served their sentences. And if they moved to Florida their vote was legal. But Jeb Bush broke the law and did not allow their vote to count in the Bush/Gore election. The Republicans also paid a fortune to a company named Choice Point to scrub the polls. They also did this in the latest election for Governor. How can they get away with these tactics? The tactics that are being used in North Carolina lately are extremely difficult to counteract.
- Anonymous
Funny (not ha ha) when I try to tell friends what is going on within Homeland Security (the redundancy, the extreme size of it and the number of government and private buildings all around the Washington suburbs) they respond by stating that they approve of all this. Homeland security is so political that this state if affairs will be sucking up our tax dollars forever.
- Neil Kitson
"These men, largely private, were functioning on a level different from the foreign policy of the United States, and years later when New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan read through the entire documentary history of the war, that history known as the Pentagon Papers, he would come away with one impression above all, which was that the government of the United States was not what he had thought it was; it was as if there were an inner U.S. government, what he called 'a centralized state, far more powerful than anything else, for whom the enemy is not simply the Communists but everything else, its own press, its own judiciary, its own Congress, foreign and friendly governments – all these are potentially antagonistic.
It had survived and perpetuated itself,' Sheehan continued, 'often using the issue of anti-Communism as a weapon against the other branches of government and the press, and finally, it does not function necessarily for the benefit of the Republic but rather for its own ends, its own perpetuation; it has its own codes which are quite different from public codes.
Secrecy was a way of protecting itself, not so much from threats by foreign governments but from detection from its own population on charges of its own competence and wisdom.' Each succeeding Administration, Sheehan noted, was careful, once in office, not to expose the weaknesses of its predecessor. After all, essentially the same people were running the governments, they had continuity to each other, and each succeeding Administration found itself faced with virtually the same enemies.
Thus the national security apparatus kept its continuity, and every outgoing President tended to rally to the side of the incumbent President.
"Out of this of course came a willingness to use covert operations; it was a necessity of the times, to match the Communists, and what your own population and your own Congress did not know was not particularly important; it was almost better if they did not know…"
David Halberstam
The Best and The Brightest- Charles Shaver
Very typically, you appear to be better informed and better read on some aspects of our failed and failing nation-state than I. Admittedly, I don't have all the answers. Briefly, though, respective of all you cite, I find the vast majority of Americans just don't want to be burdened any more with good citizenship (e.g., election statistics). Most recently, another symptom of the underlying problem was highlighted when the billionaire owner of a mere commercial (as opposed to 'professional') basketball team in a society that tolerates abject poverty and illegal war was severely chastised and sanctioned for only elitist, racist remarks. Summarily, let me say that my America took a big turn for the worse when the 'Pied Piper' was bribed to play the National Anthem. Nope, not 'ha ha' funny, at all. And, I don't know whether to dread or rejoice the day when the coerced laughter finally ends, and the music dies.
- Anonymous
During the 2nd Bush administration I started to notice all the books listed in the Washington Post book section about his administration. After awhile I thought maybe I should start reading. The first page turner was one by Bob Woodward about the lead up to the Iraq war. It showed me that we were not getting truth from the media so I kept on reading books. First about Iraq-Fiasco, The man who got is into the war Amad Chalabi, Blackwater, Bloodmoney and many others. I keep telling people to read more but they choose not to. They are either working too hard or if retired playing too hard. They just want to be spoon fed and are addicted to outrage entertainment. I continued my reading on economics, finance, climate change and understand much more than I did before. Keynes vs Hyeck explains the history of the two economic theories. Also how the shift to the right happened during The Reagan and Thatcher administrations. Age of Greed explains how a few very greedy men influenced congress to repeal laws and pass laws in their favor. Tim Flannerys book The Weather Makers explains Climate change. And there are too many books written on income disparity and the danger to democracy. What is happening is out of control and a nightmare. I don't think people understand that when a government service for the commons is privatized it becomes a corporation with lobbyists that influence Congress and that we taxpayers must pay their employees at a much higher rate. Like the army contractors, prisons and so on. People do not put on their thinking caps. Sorry for the rant.
- Charles Shaver
Interesting, impressive; different paths, one destination; better a rant than a sell-out or surrender. Beware of putting too much faith in the opinions of others, myself included. We all are products of our past and there is a natural tendency for the adult progeny to emulate the parent; the student to mimic the teacher; the reader to quote the author. I find the U.S. Constitution is the best source of information about how America should function but I don't hear or see much of that from any of the so-called 'experts.' If electrical engineers treated Ohm's Law like authors, bankers, government, lawyers and the 'people' treat the U.S. Constitution, you'd be reading this in script on parchment by candlelight, if at all. And, don't let me discourage you; where I fail you may succeed. Let reason prevail. Thanks for the stimulating conversation.
- Anonymous
Yes we all have the tendency to read whatever validates our worldview. I read Gretchen Morgensterns book named Reckless Endangerment about Fannie Mae. Saw her talk on Cspan book channel. Needed to get to the bottom of that mess. Jim Johnson was and still is a very shady character. It is strange however that the Republicans reduced the entire 2008 recession down to two sound bites Fannie Mae and the CRA (I think that is the acrynom) for the program to stop the redlining. No one knows anything about the history and purpose of Fannie Mae and it's original purpose until Johnson got his hands on it. If one has critical thinking one can sift out the truth. I just cannot believe that people will believe a sound bite without any hesitation.
- Charles Shaver
Been 'deep thinking' a lot more about the Deep State but, without yesterday's lost credentials or celebrity (good or bad), there's not much I can presently do. One clever sound-bite might do the trick but none I've composed and tried so far have caught on. Still, probably, is tomorrow.
- Anonymous
I actually thought of a really good sound bite and communicated it to the White House. No one took me up on it. Wish I could remember what it was. If you have any you could try. But they are not very confrontational.
- Charles Shaver
I liked candidate Obama's words but never voted for him, because he already belonged to one of two already proved dysfunctional major political parties. Writing the Obama White House and even getting a few generic replies while watching him fail the office, too, I do not regret 'wasting' my vote on a 'green' third party candidate. After rereading The Anatomy of the Deep State, today, I'm sure I could read more and probably phrase things better but am still confident in my decades of working-class experience-based conclusions and suggestions.
- sorval
"Land of the Free, Home of the Brave"
has become
Land of the "Free", Home of the "Brave".
- johnnyomaha
Privatization of the US constitution to serve the elite…..
- http://www.rrstevens.net/ Robert Stevens
… OR is it "Land of the Greed, Home of the Knave" -- Let's sing it all together before the next Football Game and Circus: ♫ "o'er the Land of the Greed …" ♫
- Anonymous
Where's the who, what, when, where, and why? Collected everyday simple observations will awaken one to the existence of a higher controlling entity. No more problem identification or descriptions, thank you very much. We need 1) facts and 2) solutions.
- unheilig
Lofgren gives both. Did you read the article? Confirmation is easy enough too: all you need is a browser and a few hours searching off-off-lamestream information sources.
- Jocelyn Hawley
To both dn7904 and Charles Shaver, I read your back and forth discussion and realize that I so crave that type of intelligent, informed and aware discussion within my interactions in my daily life, but none can really exist. Most people are so concerned with the outcomes of the game, or fantasy football, or the latest t.v. series, and how on earth to pay rent and other minutia. The little bit of news comes from prime time networks like Fox, NBC and CNN and they think they know what is happening in the world, but don't actually want to know what is really happening. The trick to an article like this one, is not yet how we change the problem, but how we get people to notice, be aware and to care. That is the real question and the first- most prominent problem to be solved.
- Anonymous
I think there are more creative ways for the citizenry to communicate their discontent than to wait four years for the next highly-funded election.
I remember being in an international conference and the minister of Health from a major developed country came on stage just days after making a very unpopular move. One person stood up and simply turned her back on the Minister, then another, then a dozen, then the whole auditorium of major players in the scientific community.
It made headlines.
I resent the fact that a movement like MoveOn now just asks me for money like all the other PAC's. They used to send out flyers and have photos posted of people all over the country holding the same flyer.
What comes to mind is that we remain the developed country in which the fewest people take vacation. How can we possibly stop and think about creative democracy? Ironically the revolutionary thought that was the spark that set off the flames of this country came from the leisure class who had plenty of time to think and write about things like freedom and liberty.- Charles Shaver
Thank you for prodding me to do some additional 'Deep Thinking.' The harm is done. Thanks to the apathetic and/or ignorant majority of a voting minority, the balance of power in the U.S. has now been transferred from the left hand of organized crime to the right hand, for the next two years. At least the majority is consistent in its failure to self-govern by voting, and voting wisely.
While (if) still allowed, voting wisely is the only reasonable solution. Creative protesting (e.g., 'occupy' them, pass out flyers, shout them down, turn your back or throw them a shoe) means nothing when the final vote is counted to determine who actually makes and enforces the rules. Not omniscient or perfect, either, I'm open to suggestions but with very little to work with after several decades of too-typical abuse, betrayal, exploitation and oppression, served in the pseudonyms of loyalty, patriotism, sacrifice and service. If mere reasoning worked then Bill Moyers and 'company' would have already solved most of the major problems. Don't let me discourage you, though, keep on with your own deep thinking.
- John Schoneboom
Two flaws jump out at me from this otherwise rather good and useful article. The first is that Mr. Lofgren implies that the Deep State is mainly a Republican thing. In the picture he paints, it's the Republicans who want to pay the national security state, while the poor hapless Democrats just want to increase social spending. Similarly, he makes excuses for Obama in footnote 7. (Presidents are surely mostly puppets, but Obama's 2008 FISA vote as Senator betrays his own predilections well enough.) At best, this is the farcical veneer of Deep State Theatre. I suspect Mr. Lofgren knows better and didn't mean to imply otherwise.
Secondly, government shutdowns and budgetary problems may be an inconvenience to the Deep State, but no accounting of the Deep State is complete without figuring in off-the-books revenue from the global drug trade. International partnerships and oil interests also help diversify the income stream nicely. There are many billions feeding this thing that have nothing to do with the US budget.
It's also somewhat criminal not to name-check Peter Dale Scott in this subject area. But I'm nitpicking. I'll not bother criticizing the piece for not addressing Deep State ties with terrorism, that kettle of fish deserves its own barrel. Like I said, nice piece, useful, well done, thank you.
- Douglas Harris
does no one see there is a reason for the immense defense spending as America becomes #2 in world economy and the dollar might be replaced as the reserve currency?
The Chinese own enough treasury paper to close the American economy, alone or with several willing partners. BUT…America even as a declining economic dictator will still have the arms to maintain world control…- Anonymous
I had no real a-ha moment reading this well written piece. Nothing jumped out at me as something foreign or unknown. Instead, I had the sense of deja vu, the kind of deja vu I'd rather not have. All these things have been known if the consumer of this good piece has been paying attention to the not-mainline press. What is so exciting about this is the writer put all the information in one place and drew out the connections that weren't always so obvious. Though Mr. Lofgren paints a somewhat plausible picture of how this State may rather suddenly crumble, I'm a bit dubious.
What seems missing are the global links among many of these actors especially the oligarchs reach and connection to many things terrorism. What I'm saying is that I'm not terribly optimistic that a leader will come along who is sufficiently unbeholden to the state and who can remain un-co-opted and call this state for what it is thus raising our fellow Americans sustained interest and desire to see through the mess it will take to overthrow this Deep State.. In any case, thanks so much for such a thoughtful and creepy picture.
- Anonymous
None of this is news. A President who cared could smash the Deep State in, probably, nine months. The key lockhold the Deep State has at the moment is on the nomination process, which is used to filter out any Presidents, and most Congressional nominees, who show signs of independent thought. They've been doing this since Reagan (Carter was the last President with independent thought; Reagan was ideal, being an actor with Alzheimer's and so not thinking much at all.) There are two ways this can play out: either they lose their lockhold on the nomination process, or the entire system is discredited and we get a revolution.
The Deep State is actually very fragile due to their fundamental incompetence. But they're quite capable of wrecking our existing system, at which point there will be an opening for a Caesar or a Napoleon or a Lenin who *is* competent. That is the true danger moment. The worst scenario is revolving-door coups, such as Mexico suffered for decades in the 18th and 19th century.
- Anonymous
The American Empire is, however, in decline phase. You can identify that by the inability to conquer territory and the slow loss of territory from the edges. The peak of the American Empire was actually in the late 19th century… A collapsing empire follows a weird trajectory. Many comparisons have been made to the Roman Empire. That worked out poorly.
- Anonymous
You could also read the much older "War is A Racket" by Smedley Butler.
The IMF/World Bank scam was working for a while. It doesn't work any more: South American countries simply reject it. And the US has no power to muscle South American countries any more; I'm not quite sure how they managed to become immune to US military intervention, but they have. They have had about 200 years of trial and error in figuring out how.
Now, the rest of the world just needs to copy the South American model and the US IMF/World Bank scam becomes untenable.
- Anonymous
Proportional representation is critical, but I haven't figured out how to get anyone to pay attention to it. Even at the local level, where the deep state has no traction because it's paying no attention.
- Anonymous
Thankfully the fight against electronic voting machines is already pretty strong. This is something people understand viscerally and this is a key plank for whatever party is going to dethrone the Rs & Ds. Basically, if electronic "voting" machines are delegitimized (as they should be), this means people will actually fight for their paper ballots…
- Anonymous
I think you're wrong about how most Americans will react. The levels of disillusionment are very, very high now and you can measure them in polls.
Just before the Civil War, we saw the same dynamic: most of the country was completely disillusioned about the "slavocracy", as they called the corrupt US government dominated by slaveholders. This led to the election of Lincoln, the destruction of the Whig Party, and finally, the Civil War.
This is the sort of situation we have now. The Deep State can't win; it will be smashed as Americans unite behind a Lincoln-like figure. The only questions are when this will happen, and more importantly *what comes next*. Things are wide open after that happens: Sun Yat-Sen led (unfortunately) to Mao.
- jeffries
Well it will be interesting how the Greece situation plays out. It seems strange we don't hear much or read much in main stream media about it. They are challenging the status quo. At first the banks gave them until the 28th and then cut it to 10 days. It would be in everyone's best interest if this was the beginning of the end for the EU. Diffused power is the best power. If the EU fails we won't be pressured into a union with Canada and Mexico. I think that was the plan of the global deep state. Aggregate nations into regions and then larger regions and then it would not be such a jump to global government.
- Anonymous
"….. Americans sustained interest…."
Lack of interest is the real killer of all empires.
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January 20, 2015 | Homeland Security Watch
That's the question Michael J. Glennon asks in his book "National Security and Double Government."
His answer: national security policy is determined largely by "the several hundred managers of the military, intelligence, diplomatic, and law enforcement agencies who are responsible for protecting the nation and who have come to operate largely immune from constitutional and electoral restraints." The president, congress and the courts play largely a symbolic role in national security policy, Glennon claims.
You can read a Harvard National Security Journal article that outlines Glennon's argument at this link: http://harvardnsj.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Glennon-Final.pdf. The paper is not an especially easy read, but I found it to be well researched and – for me – persuasive.
His book adds more analysis to the argument, using (from Graham Allison's Essence of Decision) the rational actor model, the government politics model, and the organizational behavior model. Glennon extends that framework by discussing culture, networks, and the myth of alternative competing hypotheses. The book is richer, in my opinion. But the core of Glennon's position is in the paper.
This link takes you to a video of Glennon talking about his book at the Cato Institute: http://www.cato.org/events/national-security-double-government (the talk starts at the 5:20 mark).
From the Cato site:
In National Security and Double Government, Michael Glennon examines the continuity in U.S. national security policy from the Bush administration to the Obama administration. Glennon explains the lack of change by pointing to the enervation of America's "Madisonian institutions," namely, the Congress, the presidency, and the courts. In Glennon's view, these institutions have been supplanted by a "Trumanite network" of bureaucrats who make up the permanent national security state. National security policymaking has been removed from public view and largely insulated from law and politics. Glennon warns that leaving security policy in the hands of the Trumanite network threatens Americans' liberties and the republican form of government.
Some blurb reviews:
- "If constitutional government is to endure in the United States, Americans must confront the fundamental challenges presented by this chilling analysis of the national security state."
Bruce Ackerman- "Glennon shows how the underlying national security bureaucracy in Washington – what might be called the deep state – ensures that presidents and their successors act on the world stage like Tweedledee and Tweedledum." John J. Mearsheimer
- "National Security and Double Government is brilliant, deep, sad, and vastly learned across multiple fields–a work of Weberian power and stature. It deserves to be read and discussed. The book raises philosophical questions in the public sphere in a way not seen at least since Fukuyama's end of history." David A. Westbrook
- "In our faux democracy, those we elect to govern serve largely ornamental purposes, while those who actually wield power, especially in the realm of national security, do so chiefly with an eye toward preserving their status and prerogatives. Read this incisive and richly documented book, and you'll understand why." Andrew J. Bacevich
- "…Michael Glennon provides a compelling argument that America's national security policy is growing outside the bounds of existing government institutions. This is at once a constitutional challenge, but is also a case study in how national security can change government institutions, create new ones, and, in effect, stand-up a parallel state…." Vali Nasr
- "Instead of being responsive to citizens or subject to effective checks and balances, U.S. national security policy is in fact conducted by a shadow government of bureaucrats and a supporting network of think tanks, media insiders, and ambitious policy wonks. Presidents may come and go, but the permanent national security establishment inevitably defeats their efforts to chart a new course…."Stephen M. Walt, Robert and Renee Belfer
I've spoken to three people I consider to be members of the "shadow national security state." One person said Glennon's argument is nothing new. The second told me he's got it exactly right. The third said it's even worse.
William R. Cumming, January 20, 2015 @ 8:38 am
ah! the deep state analyzed correctly imo!
and imo only the nuclear priesthood rivals the deep state but not exactly part of it yet its original source!
like the mayan priests only those in it know how accurate this book is in its analysis!
and a congress marches on in complete ignorance!
Mike Mealer, January 21, 2015 @ 7:48 pm
Great article. Read it a few months ago. I didn't know whether I should feel more secure or afraid. Looking the items I highlighted and a few standout.
"The dirty little secret here," a former associate counsel in the Bush White House, Brad Berenson, explained, "is that the United States government has enduring institutional interests that carry over from administration to administration and almost always dictate the position the government takes."178 P34
Its cohesion notwithstanding, the Trumanite network is curiously amorphous. It has no leader. It is not monolithic. It has no formal structure. P32
The maintenance of Trumanite autonomy has depended upon two conditions. The first is that the Madisonian institutions appear to be in charge of the nation's security. The second is that the Madisonian institutions not actually be in charge. P34
Public opinion is, accordingly, a flimsy check on the Trumanites; it is a manipulable tool of power enhancement. It is therefore rarely possible for any occupant of the Oval Office to prevail against strong, unified Trumanite opposition, for the same reasons that members of Congress and the judiciary cannot; a non-expert president, like a non-expert senator and a non-expert judge, is intimidated by expert Trumanites and does not want to place himself (or a colleague or a potential political successor) at risk by looking weak and gambling that the Trumanites are mistaken. So presidents wisely "choose" to go along. P70
John Comiskey, January 22, 2015 @ 7:14 am
Civic Education 101
Glennon laments as did Justice Souter, the pervasive civic ignorance of the citizenry. Democracy requires an informed and engaged citizenry. The recent and ongoing debates about the role the police in society raise similar question and doubts about our social contract and governance for the 21st century.
Where to from here?
A national conversation about civics and K-12 civic education.
What is the proper role of citizens in society?
What is the proper role of our polity?William R. Cumming, January 22, 2015 @ 8:53 am
Again interesting thread and comments. The use of the term "Trumanite" is unfortunate and totally inaccurate IMO! Truman reluctantly signed the National Security Act of 1947 to resolve the documented failures of Jointness between the Army and Navy in WWII [the Secretary of War and the Secretary of the Navy--Stimson and King]! Truman was personally opposed to the establishment of the CIA for many good reasons.
What is the real failure is the creation of the Nuclear Priesthood which largely failed to guard its secrets from other Nation-States and individuals and the warping into the DEEP STATE [the better term than DOUBLR GOVERTNMENT]!
And now IMO the DEEP STATE is about to DEEP SIX the Career military in the US as it organizes violence and the SURVEILLANCE STATE outside the ARMED FORCES.
A close study of the overturning of the ALIEN AND SEDITION Acts of 1798 which destroyed chances for a second term for John Adams and created the first real Presidential Election in the USA, the Presidential Election of 1800, which brought into officer Jefferson, but almost brought Aaron Burr to real power.
Study of James Madison so-called VIRGINIA RESOLUTION opposing the ASA is fully warranted. Too bad John Yoo did not know this history.
William R. Cumming, January 22, 2015 @ 2:43 pm
I need to mention that I did read the article and listened to the Cato Institute Panel.
The Panel presentations might lead one to argue that Double or nothing or the DEEP STATE what difference does it make past, present, or future?
My short answer is that Government of the people, by the people, and for the people [the Lincoln formulation] probably expired with the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki! Perhaps not but until argued and proven otherwise that is my conclusion! Perhaps wrong and hoping so!
Jack, January 24, 2015 @ 2:47 pm
A fascinating and needful argument, though I think we could make as much of the supine legislature that lends weight to Glennon's argument as he does the "permanent" executive agency security apparatus. If they're to be properly responsive to public will, executive agencies need better written laws.
The Critical Infrastructure Protection Act or CIPA, which passed the house in 2014, would, "require the Assistant Secretary of the National Protection and Programs Directorate to: (1) include in national planning scenarios the threat of electromagnetic pulse (EMP) events…" (emphasis mine). The national planning scenarios were rescinded in 2011, making CIPA either a very easy or very hard law to execute.
Likewise, the Biggert-Waters flood insurance reform act of 2012 altered regulatory definitions for "substantial damage" and "substantial improvement" by misunderstanding the way field damage assessments are performed under the National Flood Insurance Program.
Which means, I suppose, that we need more able legislators…which may be unlikely if more Americans don't know Publius from Curly.
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therealnews.com
Chris Hedges, whose column is published Mondays on Truthdig, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years. He has written nine books, including "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle" (2009), "I Don't Believe in Atheists" (2008) and the best-selling "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America" (2008). His book "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" (2003) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.
CHRIS HEDGES, PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING JOURNALIST: Hi. I'm Chris Hedges. And we are here in Salem, Oregon, interviewing Dr. Sheldon Wolin, who taught politics for many years at Berkeley and, later, Princeton. He is the author of several seminal works on political philosophy, including Politics and Vision and Democracy Inc.. And we are going to be asking him today about the state of American democracy, political participation, and what he calls inverted totalitarianism.So let's begin with this concept of inverted totalitarianism, which has antecedents. And in your great work Politics and Vision, you reach back all the way to the Greeks, up through the present age, to talk about the evolution of political philosophy. What do you mean by it?
SHELDON WOLIN, PROF. POLITICS EMERITUS, PRINCETON: Well, I mean by it that in the inverted idea, it's the idea that democracy has been, in effect, turned upside down. It's supposed to be a government by the people and for the people and all the rest of the sort of rhetoric we're used to, but it's become now so patently an organized form of government dominated by groups which are only vaguely, if at all, responsible or even responsive to popular needs and popular demands. But at the same time, it retains a kind of pattern of democracy, because we still have elections, they're still relatively free in any conventional sense. We have a relatively free media. But what's missing from it is a kind of crucial continuous opposition which has a coherent position, and is not just saying, no, no, no but has got an alternative, and above all has got an ongoing critique of what's wrong and what needs to be remedied.
HEDGES: You juxtapose inverted totalitarianism to classical totalitarianism -- fascism, communism -- and you say that there are very kind of distinct differences between these two types of totalitarianism. What are those differences?
WOLIN: Well, certainly one is the -- in classic totalitarianism the fundamental principle is the leadership principle and the notion that the masses exist not as citizenry but as a means of support which can be rallied and mustered almost at will by the dominant powers. That's the classical one. And the contemporary one is one in which the rule by the people is enshrined as a sort of popular message about what we are, but which in fact is not really true to the facts of political life in this day and age.
HEDGES: Well, you talk about how in classical totalitarian regimes, politics trumps economics, but in inverted totalitarianism it's the reverse.
WOLIN: That's right. Yeah. In classic totalitarianism, thinking here now about the Nazis and the fascists, and also even about the communists, the economy is viewed as a tool which the powers that be manipulate and utilize in accordance with what they conceive to be the political requirements of ruling. And they will take whatever steps are needed in the economy in order to ensure the long-run sustainability of the political order. In other words, the sort of arrows of political power flow from top to bottom.
Now, in inverted totalitarianism, the imagery is that of a populace which is enshrined as the leadership group but which in fact doesn't rule, but which is turned upside down in the sense that the people are enshrined at the top but don't rule. And minority rule is usually treated as something to be abhorred but is in fact what we have.
And it's the problem has to do, I think, with the historical relationship between political orders and economic orders. And democracy, I think, from the beginning never quite managed to make the kind of case for an economic order that would sustain and help to develop democracy rather than being a kind of constant threat to the egalitarianism and popular rule that democracy stands for.
HEDGES: In your book Politics and Vision, you quote figures like Max Weber who talk about capitalism as in fact being a destructive force to democracy.
WOLIN: Well, I think Weber's critique of capitalism is even broader. I think he views it as quintessentially destructive not only of democracy, but also, of course, of the sort of feudal aristocratic system which had preceded it. Capitalism is destructive because it has to eliminate the kind of custom /ˈmɔːreɪz/, political values, even institutions that present any kind of credible threat to the autonomy of the economy. And it's that -- that's where the battle lies. Capitalism wants an autonomous economy. They want a political order subservient to the needs of the economy. And their notion of an economy, while it's broadly based in the sense of a capitalism in which there can be relatively free entrance and property is relatively widely dispersed it's also a capitalism which, in the last analysis, is [as] elitist as any aristocratic system ever was.
HEDGES: You talk in the book about about how it was essentially the engine of the Cold War, juxtaposing a supposedly socialist Soviet Union, although like many writers, including Chomsky, I think you would argue that Leninism was not a socialist movement. Adam Ulam talks about it as a counterrevolution, Chomsky as a right-wing deviation. But nevertheless, that juxtaposition of the Cold War essentially freed corporate capitalism in the name of the struggle against communism to deform American democracy.
And also I just want to make it clear that you are very aware, especially in Politics and Vision, of the hesitancy on the part of our founding fathers to actually permit direct democracy. So we're not in this moment idealizing the system that was put in place. But maybe you could talk a little bit about that.
WOLIN: Well, I think that's true. I think the system that was consciously and deliberately constructed by the founders who framed the Constitution -- that democracy was the enemy. And that was rooted in historical realities. Many of the colonial governments had a very strong popular element that became increasingly prominent as the colonies moved towards rebellion. And rebellion meant not only resisting British rule, but also involved the growth of popular institutions and their hegemony in the colonies, as well as in the nation as a whole, so that the original impulses to the Constitution came in large measure from this democratizing movement. But the framers of the Constitution understood very well that this would mean -- would at least -- would jeopardize the ruling groups that they thought were absolutely necessary to any kind of a civilized order. And by "ruling groups", they meant not only those who were better educated, but those who were propertied, because they regarded property as a sign of talent and of ability, so that it wasn't just wealth as such, but rather a constellation of virtues as well as wealth that entitled capitalists to rule. And they felt that this was in the best interests of the country.
And you must remember at this time that the people, so-called, were not well-educated and in many ways were feeling their way towards defining their own role in the political system. And above all, they were preoccupied, as people always have been, with making a living, with surviving. And those were difficult times, as most times are, so that politics for them could only be an occasional activity, and so that there would always be an uneasy relationship between a democracy that was often quiescent and a form of rule which was constantly trying to reduce, as far as possible, Democratic influence in order to permit those who were qualified to govern the country in the best interests of the country.
HEDGES: And, of course, when we talk about property, we must include slaveholders.
WOLIN: Indeed. Indeed. Although, of course, there was, in the beginning, a tension between the northern colonies and the southern colonies.
HEDGES: This fear of direct democracy is kind of epitomized by Thomas Paine, --
WOLIN: Yeah. Yeah.
HEDGES: -- who was very useful in fomenting revolutionary consciousness, but essentially turned into a pariah once the Revolution was over and the native aristocracy sought to limit the power of participatory democracy.
WOLIN: Yeah, I think that's true. I think it's too bad Paine didn't have at his disposal Lenin's phrase "permanent revolution", because I think that's what he felt, not in the sense of violence, violence, violence, but in the sense of a kind of conscious participatory element that was very strong, that would have to be continuous, and that it couldn't just be episodic, so that there was always a tension between what he thought to be democratic vitality and the sort of ordered, structured, election-related, term-related kind of political system that the framers had in mind.
HEDGES: So let's look at the Cold War, because in Politics and Vision, as in Democracy Inc., you talk about the framing of what Dwight Macdonald will call the psychosis of permanent war, this constant battle against communism, as giving capital the tools by which they could destroy those democratic institutions, traditions, and values that were in place. How did that happen? What was the process?
WOLIN: Well, I think it happened because of the way that the Cold War was framed. That is, it was framed as not only a war between communism and capitalism, but also a war of which the subtext was that communism was, after all, an ideology that favored ordinary people. Now, it got perverted, there's no question about that, by Lenin and by Stalin and into something very, very different.
But in the Cold War, I think what was lost in the struggle was the ability to see that there was some kind of justification and historical reality for the appearance of communism, that it wasn't just a freak and it wasn't just a kind of mindless dictatorship, but that the plight of ordinary people under the forms of economic organization that had become prominent, the plight of the common people had become desperate. There was no Social Security. There were no wage guarantees. There was no union organization.
HEDGES: So it's just like today.
WOLIN: Yeah. They were powerless. And the ruling groups, the capitalist groups, were very conscious of what they had and what was needed to keep it going. And that's why figures like Alexander Hamilton are so important, because they understood this, they understood it from the beginning, that what capitalism required in the way not only of so-called free enterprise -- but remember, Hamilton believed very, very strongly in the kind of camaraderie between capitalism and strong central government, that strong central government was not the enemy of capitalism, but rather its tool, and that what had to be constantly kind of revitalized was that kind of relationship, because it was always being threatened by populist democracy, which wanted to break that link and cause government to be returned to some kind of responsive relationship to the people.
HEDGES: And the Cold War. So the Cold War arises. And this becomes the kind of moment by which capital, and especially corporate capital, can dismantle the New Deal and free itself from any kind of regulation and constraint to deform and destroy American democracy. Can you talk about that process, what happened during that period?
WOLIN: Well, I think the first thing to be said about it is the success with which the governing groups manage to create a Cold War that was really so total in its spread that it was hard to mount a critical opposition or to take a more detached view of our relationship to the Soviet Union and just what kind of problem it created. And it also had the effect, of course, of skewing the way we looked at domestic discontents, domestic inequalities, and so on, because it was always easy to tar them with the brush of communism, so that the communism was just more than a regime. It was also a kind of total depiction of what was the threat to -- and complete opposite to our own form of society, our old form of economy and government.
HEDGES: And in Politics and Vision, you talk about because of that ideological clash, therefore any restriction of capitalism which was defined in opposition to communism as a kind of democratic good, if you want to use that word, was lifted in the name of the battle against communism, that it became capitalism that was juxtaposed to communism rather than democracy, and therefore this empowered capital, in a very pernicious way, to dismantle democratic institutions in the name of the war on communism.
WOLIN: Oh, I think there's no question about that, the notion that you first had to, so to speak, unleash the great potential capitalism had for improving everybody's economical lot and the kind of constraints that had been developed not only by the New Deal, but by progressive movements throughout the 19th century and early 20th century in the United States, where it had been increasingly understood that while American economic institutions were a good thing, so to speak, and needed to be nurtured and developed, they also posed a threat. They posed a threat because they tended to result in concentrations of power, concentrations of economic power that quickly translated themselves into political influence because of the inevitably porous nature of democratic representation and elections and rule, so that the difficulty's been there for a long time, been recognized for a long time, but we go through these periods of sleepwalking where we have to relearn lessons that have been known almost since the birth of the republic, or at least since the birth of Jeffersonian democracy, that capitalism has its virtues, but it has to be carefully, carefully watched, observed, and often controlled.
HEDGES: Thank you. Please join us for part two later on with our interview with Professor Sheldon Wolin.
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therealnews.com
CHRIS HEDGES, PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING JOURNALIST: Welcome back to part three of our discussion with Professor Sheldon Wolin.You talk in both of your books, Politics and Vision and Democracy Incorporated, about superpower, which you call the true face of inverted totalitarianism. What is superpower? How do you describe it?
SHELDON WOLIN, PROF. EMERITUS POLITICS, PRINCETON: Well, I think it's important to grasp that superpower includes as one of its two main elements the modern economy. And the modern economy, with its foundations in not only economic activity but scientific research, is always a dynamic economy and always constantly seeking to expand, to get new markets, to be able to produce new goods, and so on. So the superpower's dynamism becomes a kind of counterpart to the character of the modern economy, which has become so dominant that it defines the political forms.
I mean, the first person to really recognize this -- which we always are embarrassed to say -- was Karl Marx, who did understand that economic forms shape political forms, that economic forms are the way people make a living, they're the way goods and services are produced, and they determine the nature of society, so that any kind of government which is responsive to society is going to reflect that kind of structure and in itself be undemocratic, be elitist in a fundamental sense, and have consumers as citizens.
HEDGES: And Marx would also argue that it also defines ideology.
WOLIN: It does. It does define ideology. Marx was really the first to see that ideology had become a kind of -- although there are antecedents, had become a kind of preconceived package of ideas and centered around the notion of control, that it represented something new in the world because you now had the resources to disseminate it, to impose it, and to generally make certain that a society became, so to speak, educated in precisely the kind of ideas you wanted them to be educated in. And that became all the more important when societies entered the stage of relatively advanced capitalism, where the emphasis was upon work, getting a job, keeping your job, holding it in insecure times. And when you've got that kind of situation, everybody wants to put their political beliefs on hold. They don't want to have to agonize over them while they're agonizing over the search for work or worrying about the insecurity of their position. They're understandably preoccupied with survival. And at that point, democracy becomes at best a luxury and at worst simply an afterthought, so that its future becomes very seriously compromised, I think.
HEDGES: And when the ruling ideology is determined by capitalism -- corporate capitalism; you're right -- we have an upending of traditional democratic values, because capitalist values are about expansion, exploitation, profit, the cult of the self, and you stop even asking questions that can bring you into democratic or participatory democracy.
WOLIN: I think that's true to an extent. But I would amend that to say that once the kind of supremacy of the capitalist regime becomes assured, and where it's evident to everyone that it's not got a real alternative in confronting it, that I think its genius is it sees that a certain relaxation is not only possible, but even desirable, because it gives the impression that the regime is being supported by public debate and supported by people who were arguing with other people, who were allowed to speak their minds, and so on. And I think it's when you reach that stage -- as I think we have -- that the problematic relationship between capitalism and democracy become more and more acute.
HEDGES: And yet we don't have anyone within the mainstream who questions either superpower or capitalism.
WOLIN: No, they don't. And I don't think it's -- it may be a question of weakness, but I think -- the problem is really, I think, more sort of quixotic. That is, capitalism -- unlike earlier forms of economic organization, capitalism thrives on change. It presents itself as the dynamic form of society, with new inventions, new discoveries, new forms of wealth, so that it doesn't appear like the old regime -- as sort of an encrusted old fogey type of society. And I think that makes a great deal of difference, because in a certain sense you almost get roles reversed. That is, in the old regime, the dominant powers, aristocracy and so on, want to keep the lid on, and the insurgent democracy, the liberalizing powers, wanted to take the lid off.
But now I think you get it -- as I say, I think you get it kind of reversed, that democracy, it now wants -- in its form of being sort of the public philosophy, now wants to keep the lid on and becomes, I think, increasingly less -- more adverse to examining in a -- through self-examination, and becomes increasingly, I would say, even intolerant of views which question its own assumptions, and above all question its consequences, because I think that's where the real issues lie is not so much with the assumptions of democracy but with the consequences and trying to figure out how we've managed to get a political system that preaches equality and an economic system which thrives on inequality and produces inequality as a matter of course.
HEDGES: Well, in all totalitarian societies there's a vast disconnect between rhetoric and reality, which, of course, would characterize inverted totalitarianism as a species of totalitarianism.
WOLIN: Well, I guess that's true. I think I'd probably qualify that, because I'd qualify it in the sense that when you look at Naziism and fascism, they were pretty upfront about a lot of things -- leadership principle, racist principles -- and they made no secret that they wanted to dominate the world, so that I think there was a certain kind of aggressive openness in those regimes that I think isn't true of our contemporary situation.
HEDGES: And yet in the same time, in those regimes, I mean, you look at Stalin's constitution as a document, it was very liberal, --
WOLIN: Sure.
HEDGES: -- it protected human rights and free speech. And so on the one hand -- at least in terms of civil liberties. And we have, as superpower, exactly replicated in many ways this call for constant global domination and expansion that was part of what you would describe as classical totalitarianism. And that -- you're right, in that the notion of superpower is that it's global and that that constant global expansion, which is twinned with the engine of corporate capitalism, is something that you say has diminished the reality of the nation-state itself -- somehow the nation-state becomes insignificant in the great game of superpower global empire -- and that that has consequences both economically and politically.
WOLIN: Well, I think it does. I think one has to treat the matter carefully, because a lot of the vestiges of the nation-states still are, obviously, in existence. But I think one of the important tendencies of our time -- I would say not tendencies, but trends -- is that sovereign governments based on so-called liberal democracy have discovered that the only way they can survive is by giving up a large dose of their sovereignty, by setting up European Unions, various trade pacts, and other sort of regional alliances that place constraints on their power, which they ordinarily would proclaim as natural to having any nation at all, and so that that kind of development, I think, is fraught with all kinds of implications, not the least of [them] being not only whether -- what kind of actors we have now in the case of nation-states, but what the future of social reform is, when the vehicle of that reform has now been sort of transmuted into a system where it's lost a degree of autonomy and, hence, its capacity to create the reforms or promote the reforms that people in social movements had wanted the nation-state to do.
HEDGES: And part of that surrender has been the impoverishment of the working class with the flight of manufacturing. And I think it's in Politics and Vision you talk about how the war that is made by the inverted totalitarian system against the welfare state never publicly accepts the reality that it was the system that caused the impoverishment, that those who are impoverished are somehow to blame for their own predicament. And this, of course, is part of the skill of the public relations industry, the mask of corporate power, which you write is really dominated by personalities, political personalities that we pick. And that has had, I think (I don't know if you would agree), a kind of -- a very effective -- it has been a very effective way by which the poor and the working class have internalized their own repression and in many ways become disempowered, because I think that that message is one that even at a street level many people have ingested.
WOLIN: Yeah. I think you're right about that. The problem of how to get a foothold by Democratic forces in the kind of society we have is so problematic now that it's very hard to envision it would take place. And the ubiquity of the present economic system is so profound (and it's accompanied by this apparent denial of its own reality) that it becomes very hard to find a defender of it who doesn't want to claim in the end that he's really on your side.
Yeah, it's a very paradoxical situation. And I don't know. I mean, I think we all have to take a deep breath and try to start from scratch again in thinking about where we are, how we get there, and what kind of immediate steps we might take in order to alter the course that I think we're on, which really creates societies which, when you spell out what's happening, nobody really wants, or at least not ordinary people want. It's a very strange situation where -- and I think, you know, not least among them is, I think, the factor that you suggested, which is the kind of evaporation of leisure time and the opportunities to use that for political education, as well as kind of moral refreshment. But, yeah, it's a really totally unprecedented situation where you've got affluence, opportunity, and so on, and you have these kinds of frustrations, injustices, and really very diminished life prospects.
HEDGES: You agree, I think, with Karl Marx that unfettered, unregulated corporate capitalism is a revolutionary force.
WOLIN: Oh, indeed. I think it's been demonstrated even beyond his wildest dreams that it -- yeah, you're just -- you just have to see what happens when a underdeveloped part of the world, as they're called, becomes developed by capitalism -- it just transforms everything, from social relations to not only economic relations, but prospects in society for various classes and so on. No, it's a mighty, mighty force. And the problem it always creates is trying to get a handle on it, partly because it's so omnipresent, it's so much a part of what we're used to, that we can't recognize what we're used to as a threat. And that's part of the paradox.
HEDGES: You take issue with this or, you know, point out that in fact it is a revolutionary force. And yet it is somehow, as a political and economic position, the domain of people as self-identified conservatives.
WOLIN: Yeah, it is. I think they're conservative on sort of one side of their face, as it were, because I think they're always willing to radically change, let's say, social legislation that's in existence to defend people, ordinary people. I think they're very selective about what they want to preserve and what they want to either undermine or completely eliminate.
That's, of course, the kind of way that the political system presents itself in kind of an interesting way. That is, you get this combination of conservative and liberal in the party system. I mean, the Republicans stand for pretty much the preservation of the status quo, and the Democrats have as their historical function a kind of mild, modest, moderate reformism that's going to deal with some of the excesses without challenging very often the basic system, so that it kind of strikes a wonderful balance between preservation and criticism. The criticism -- because the preservation element is so strong, criticism becomes always constructive, in the sense that it presumes the continued operation of the present system and its main elements.
HEDGES: Of both corporate capitalism and superpower.
WOLIN: Absolutely.
HEDGES: And yet you say that at this point, political debate has really devolved into what you call nonsubstantial issues, issues that don't really mean anything if we talk about politics as centered around the common good.
WOLIN: Yeah, political debate has become either so rhetorically excessive as to be beside the point, or else to be so shy of taking on the basic problems. But again you're back in the kind of chasing-the-tail problem. The mechanisms, i.e. political parties, that we have that are supposed to organize and express discontent are, of course, precisely the organs that require the money that only the dominant groups possess. I mean, long ago there were theories or proposals being floated to set up public financing. But public financing, even as it was conceived then, was so miniscule that you couldn't possibly even support a kind of lively political debate in a modest way.
You know, politics has become such an expensive thing that I think really the only way to describe it realistically is to talk about it as a political economy or an economic kind of political economy. It's got those -- those two are inextricable elements now in the business of the national or state governments, too.
HEDGES: And yet I think you could argue that even the Democratic Party under Clinton and under Obama, while it continues to use the rhetoric of that kind of feel-your-pain language, which has been part of the Democratic establishment, has only furthered the agenda of superpower, of corporate capitalism, and, of course, the rise of the security and surveillance state by which all of us are kept in check.
WOLIN: Yeah, I think that's true, because the reformers have simply hesitated -- really, really hesitated -- to undertake any kind of a focus upon political reform.
HEDGES: Haven't the reformers been bought off, in essence?
WOLIN: I think it's the no-no subject. I don't think it even has to be bought off anymore. I think that it is such a kind of third rail that nobody wants to touch it, because I think there is a real in-built fear that if you mess with those kind of so-called fundamental structures, you're going to bring down the house. And that includes messing with them even by constitutional, legal means, that it's so fragile, so delicate, so this that and the other thing that inhibit all kinds of efforts at reforming it. As the phrase used to go, it's a machine that goes of itself -- so they think.
HEDGES: Thank you.
Stay tuned for part four, coming up, of our interview with Professor Sheldon Wolin.
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Oct 28, 2015 | coreyrobin.com
Sheldon Wolin's the reason I began drinking coffee.
I was a freshman at Princeton. It was the fall of 1985. I signed up to take a course called "Modern Political Theory." It was scheduled for Mondays and Wednesdays at 9 am. I had no idea what I was doing. I stumbled into class, and there was a man with white hair and a trim white beard, lecturing on Machiavelli. I was transfixed.
There was just one problem: I was-still am-most definitely not a morning person. Even though the lectures were riveting, I had to fight my tendency to fall asleep. Even worse, I had to fight my tendency to sleep in.
So I started-- drinking coffee. I'd show up for class fully caffeinated. And proceeded to work my way through the canon-Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, along with some texts you don't often get in intro theory courses (the Putney Debates, Montesquieu's Persian Letters, and for a last hurrah: Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations)-under the guidance of one of the great readers of the twentieth century.
More than anything else, that's what Sheldon Wolin was: a reader of texts. He approached The Prince as if it were a novel, identifying its narrative voice, analyzing the literary construction of the characters who populated the text (new prince, customary prince, centaur, the people), examining the structural tensions in the narrative (How does a Machiavellian adviser advise a non-Machiavellian prince?), and so on. It was exhilarating.
And then after class I'd head straight for Firestone Library; read whatever we were reading that week in class; follow along, chapter by chapter, with Wolin's Politics and Vision, which remains to this day the single best book on Western political theory that I know of (even though lots of the texts we were talking about in class don't appear there, or appear there with very different interpretations from the ones Wolin was offering in class: the man never stood still, intellectually); and get my second cup of coffee.
This is all a long wind-up to the fact that this morning, my friend Antonio Vazquez-Arroyo, sent me a two-part interview that Chris Hedges conducted with Wolin, who's living out in Salem, Oregon now. From his Wikipedia page, I gather that Wolin's 92. He looks exactly the same as he did in 1985. And sounds the same. Though it seems from the video as if he may now be losing his sight. Which is devastating when I think about the opening passages of Politics and Vision, about how vision is so critical to the political theorist and the practice of theoria.
Anyway, here he is, talking to Hedges about his thesis of "inverted totalitarianism":
In classic totalitarianism, thinking here now about the Nazis and the fascists, and also even about the communists, the economy is viewed as a tool which the powers that be manipulate and utilize in accordance with what they conceive to be the political requirements of ruling. And they will take whatever steps are needed in the economy in order to ensure the long-run sustainability of the political order. In other words, the sort of arrows of political power flow from top to bottom.
Now, in inverted totalitarianism, the imagery is that of a populace which is enshrined as the leadership group but which in fact doesn't rule, but which is turned upside down in the sense that the people are enshrined at the top but don't rule. And minority rule is usually treated as something to be abhorred but is in fact what we have. And it's the problem has to do, I think, with the historical relationship between political orders and economic orders. And democracy, I think, from the beginning never quite managed to make the kind of case for an economic order that would sustain and help to develop democracy rather than being a kind of constant threat to the egalitarianism and popular rule that democracy stands for.
… ... ...
Capitalism is destructive because it has to eliminate the kind of custom, mores, political values, even institutions that present any kind of credible threat to the autonomy of the economy. And it's that–that's where the battle lies. Capitalism wants an autonomous economy. They want a political order subservient to the needs of the economy. And their notion of an economy, while it's broadly based in the sense of a capitalism in which there can be relatively free entrance and property is relatively widely dispersed it's also a capitalism which, in the last analysis, is [as] elitist as any aristocratic system ever was.
Have a listen and a watch. Part 1 and then Part 2.
Pt 1-8 Hedges & Wolin Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist
Pt 2:
see also
- Sheldon Wolin: Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist? Parts 2-3, interviewed by Chris Hedges
- Sheldon Wolin: Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist? Part 4, interviewed by Chris Hedges (transcript in naked capitalism)
- Sheldon Wolin: Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist? Part 5, interviewed by Chris Hedges
- Sheldon Wolin: Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist? Part 6, interviewed by Chris Hedges
- Sheldon Wolin: Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist? Part 7, interviewed by Chris Hedges
- Sheldon Wolin: Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist? Part 8, interviewed by Chris Hedges
- Chris Hedges: The Disease of Imperialism + Transcript
- Chris Hedges, Cornel West, Richard D. Wolff Respond to Thomas Paine's Question: What Is To Be Done? by Jill Dalton
- "Inverted Totalitarianism" by Guadamour
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Amazon
J. Roth on October 14, 2015
A Groundbreaking Resource, Second Only to "JFK and the Unspeakable"
A tremendous resource of breathtaking depth and clarity. Talbot builds on the now decades-old body of research - initiated by investigative reporters Tom Mangold ("Cold Warrior") and David Wise ("Molehunt"), and largely developed by assassination researchers James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease ("The Assassinations") - and adds groundbreaking new information.
Talbot focusses extensively on James Jesus Angleton, the shadowy counterintelligence figure at the heart of the domestic assassinations of the 1960s, and examines the inner-workings of Dulles' ambitious (and dastardly) plot to consolidate and control global political power. "The Devil's Chessboard" is a startling and revelatory masterwork. In terms of easy-to-access assassination research, this book is second only to James Douglass' "JFK and the Unspeakable." In terms of biographies of Dulles and Angleton, two of history's most infamous figures, this work is second to none.
Note: Be wary of one-star reviews for this book. Some trace back to commissioned-review services, the same services that give five-star reviews to shady/suspicious health and beauty products. Go figure.
James Norwood on October 14, 2015
The Shadow Government of Allen Dulles: Organized Irresponsibility
To read this magnificent book by David Talbot is to understand how the JFK assassination occurred and how the truth was concealed by officialdom in the Warren Report. Unlike his brother, John Foster Dulles, the younger Allen Welsh Dulles rarely makes it into American history textbooks. In this extremely detailed study, the singular importance of Allen Dulles is demonstrated as being central to a watershed period in the American Century.
First and foremost, "The Devil's Chessboard" is a beautifully written and meticulously researched volume. Talbot drew upon archives at Princeton University, where the Allen Dulles papers are housed. He also conducted research in other archives across the country. The documentary work is buttressed and amplified by interviews with the surviving daughter of Dulles, as well as interviews with the children of Dulles' colleagues and over 150 officials from the Kennedy administration. Nearly forty pages of notes serve to document the author's sources.
One of the most revealing moments about Allen Dulles was when he was ten years old and spending time at the family's lake home in upstate New York. After his five-year-old sister fell into the lake and was drifting away from him, Allen stood stock still, "strangely impassive. The boy just stood on the dock and watched as his little sister drifted away." (p. 19) Fortunately, the child was rescued by the mother. The behavior of young Allen is representative of a lifelong predilection for observing the imponderables of life as an insider while looking to others to "risk their skins." For this little boy, the world was already forming into a chessboard with pawns to manipulate for his self-serving needs. Talbot describes Dulles' rogue actions in allowing Nazi war criminals to avoid prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials in these chilling words: "Even in the life-and-death throes of wartime espionage, Dulles seemed untouched by the intense human drama swirling around him." (p. 120)
In one of the most riveting moments of the book, Talbot describes an interchange between Dulles and researcher David Lifton at a colloquium on the JFK assassination at the campus of UCLA in 1965. Lifton came prepared to challenge Dulles on major deficiencies of the Warren Report. By the end of the evening, the students attending the session were more interested in Lifton's findings than Dulles' unsuccessful attempts to deflect the tough questions. In retrospect, Lifton apparently claimed that he "was in the presence of 'evil' that night." (p. 591)
A heretofore unanswered question about the JFK assassination is what was Allen Dulles was doing between the time he was fired by JFK as Director of the CIA in 1961 until the moment of the assassination on November 22, 1963. A related question is how was it conceivable for Dulles to have been appointed to the Warren Commission that eventually produced the conclusions that are still accepted by mainstream historians and the media? Talbot's intensive research helps to shed on light on those questions by tracing the arc of development of the career of Allen Dulles as a high-powered attorney at the center of the elitist East Coast establishment, his shocking collaboration with the Nazis while working in the OSS, and his career in clandestine activities at the CIA
Talbot's research probes not merely the activities of Dulles as Director of the CIA, but explores the broader context of his function over three decades as a power broker, whose "efforts were directed not against hostile governments but against his own." (p. 3) Talbot cites revelations from the Columbia University sociology professor C. Wright Mills about the secret government of Allen Dulles, which was comprised of a "power elite" and based on the anti-Constitutional premise of "organized irresponsibility."
In many ways, "The Devil's Chessboard" is a companion volume to Talbot's essential study "Brothers," which focuses on the relationship of John and Robert Kennedy, the assassination of JFK, and the aftereffects on RFK. But the more recent book on Dulles covers the broader scope of how the American government was transformed into the national security state in the years following World War II. Talbot's goal in preparing this book is to demonstrate the urgency of coming to terms with our past and how "it is essential that we continue to fight for the right to own our history." (p. xii) An excellent place to begin that quest is to own this book.
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March 25, 2010 | Populist Daily
The word "Fascist" as with the terms "Socialist" and "Communist" are thrown around a lot by people who have no idea what they mean. If you want to know what those terms really mean, find someone who was in some branch of military counterintelligence, the CIA, the security section of the State Department, Defense Intelligence, or in the FBI.In all those areas, the first day of basic training involves comparative forms of government. You can't spot a Communist if you don't know what a Communist is. You can't tell the difference between a Communist and a Fascist unless you know the difference in the two systems. It is Intelligence, and more specifically, Counterintelligence 101.
So, let's go right to Fascism. A Fascist is one who believes in a corporatist society. In other words, it is a political philosophy embodying very strong central government, with the authority to move in decisive steps to accomplish goals. It would be characterized by a unity of purpose, with more or less all the levels of the hierarchy in unison, starting at the top and working down. It is a top-down government involving an alliance of industry, military, media and a political party.
Because Fascism has been associated with the 1930s German Nazis, the Italian Fascists under Mussolini and the Falangists, under the Spanish Dictator, Francisco Franco, the term "Fascist" has taken on a sinister meaning. Not fewer than 10 million direct deaths resulting from the rule of these three may have something to do with it. On the other hand, philosophies don't kill people; people kill people.
It is interesting to note that at least two of the three Parties had origins as Socialist and morphed into strong, Right Wing, authoritarian rules as a result largely of expediency. It is also interesting to note that all three were not only intimately connected to the largest industrial corporations, but as soon as possible with the military leadership. While Fascism as a political philosophy is not innately evil, given the results, it is worth noting how things turned out.
Both the German and the Italian Fascist parties were also both revolutionary and conservative at the same time. Both Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini were aggressive, anarchic leaders. Both served time in jail. Both served in the enlisted ranks with the military in war. Both used that experience to organize mobs of thugs to agitate against an established government, not for a more democratic regime, but for a more authoritarian one. You can begin to see some similarities with contemporary political activities.
As soon as they took power, which they did partially through gangs and mobs, intimidation and demonstrations and-in Mussolini's case an outright coup - they allied themselves with the biggest corporations and the military general staff. In addition, even before taking complete power, they began to wrest control of the media away from other political parties, and to use it for their own propaganda.
Once they had control of the radio and newspapers, which were then the prominent sources of information, they could begin to broadcast their messages. Hitler's "Big Lie" basically blamed rampant inflation and lack of jobs on the Jews. He blamed all their economic ills on the restraint of Germany by other nations and the presumed taking over of German lands (which they themselves had only won through aggressive wars.)
But let's for a minute assume that we know nothing about Fascism except that it exists. We have a group, here in America that believes in a corporatist political philosophy. What would that look like? If it were a true Fascist organization, they would ally themselves with big corporations, like the health care industry, oil and mining, pharmaceuticals, media corporations and the military-industrial complex.
They would try to control the message, particularly in radio and television. They would become as closely allied with the top military brass as possible, offering them a seat at the table in the running of the economy. Retired Generals would be assured of positions involved with military hardware and strategic planning.
And what about the people? In a fascist system, the whole idea is to have an efficient method of getting things done. If you want to build an "autobahn" you simply tell the transportation minister to get started. You control everything at every level. It will go faster because it is for the good of all the people, so no one will have the right to object or interfere. It is, Fascists would say, about efficiency, getting things done for the people.
Defense is about protecting the people. You attack other countries so that they cannot attack you. You start wars (Iraq) to prevent dangerous men from attacking you. It makes sense. Military efficiency in a Fascist state means that if the top guy (President or Dictator) wants to be absolutely certain that no other country is superior, he can build up the military industry and the military at any pace or at any cost.
In a Fascist state the idea is to have one set of rules, coming from the top down. No one votes as an individual, only as a part of the group that is assigned a task. It is corporate, total-totalitarian. So, if you decide that a national health care program is not right for the country, you all vote against it in a totally militaristic way. Everyone salutes and follows the lead from the top down. The only problem is when you do not have a strong leader.
The Democrats, for example, want to farm decisions out to others, let the opposition have their input. It slows the process. A Fascist health care program would be one decided upon by the President, discussed and worked out with the corporations, mandated to his staffs and enacted without any discussion or public debate in a matter of a few months.
In a Fascist state, policy is largely being written through a cooperative effort with the industries involved, in this case the health care industry. The slow, ragged, messy and Democratic process involved with our current health care reform process would never happen under a Fascist government. Whatever the decision, there would be no appeal. If a million or fifty million were left out, because, let's say, that the President needed more money for war machines that would be the decision- with no question or appeal.
So, if you want efficiency, you not only should you look to the Republicans, but you may have no choice. The Republicans, remember, have the complete support of Fox News, the Fox television Network, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and any number of television stations around the country, plus somewhere between 600 and 1600 radio stations on which literally 9 out of 10 commentators are paid by those network owners to be Conservative (Neoconservative Republican.) They have expanded to very large numbers of web site bases, delivering whatever type of information they want, truth, lies, anything in between… accusations without proof…Socialist, Communist, government takeover of this or that…no need to be truthful. It is all propaganda.
Just as Herr Goebbels and Mussolini did in the 1930s-and except in the Communist counties and a few Latin American dictatorships there hasn't been anything to speak of similar to this in the Western advanced societies since then-the unchallenged message of the Right Wing goes out. The radio commentators today get their message from the top, from the Republican Party. Fox News Channel internal memos have shown that they literally decide what policies the Republican Party wished to champion, and then they attack rather than merely delivering the news.
So do we need to be civil about it-about these lies? Is it important to challenge people, like these Right Wing commentators who tell you that your current health care is sufficient? It is good for corporations, for health care insurance companies. But is it good for you not to be sure you can get health insurance? So if they tell you that something is a government takeover and it is not, so you vote against health care or you respond to a poll in a way that is against your own best interests…do you need to be civil about being lied to? You shouldn't be lied to by media. You need the truth, the facts, to make decisions.
It is a pretty simple answer. Should you be civil to people who lie to you and urge you to buy something that turns out to hurt you, or your family, or cause you to lose your job, or kill your sister, brother, neighbor? If I lie to you and say it is safe to swim across the channel and you are attacked by sharks that I knew were there…should you not care? This is what is happening, right now…today. In the consumer products market, we call that fraud and companies can be criminally liable.
So let's describe what a Fascist government or a political party attempting to introduce a Fascist government would look like and see if either or any of our political parties fits that description:
- Allies with big corporations, planning strategy together, interchangeable.
- Works to have control of the political process at all levels, starting with the top down.
- Does not cooperate with and actually tries to undermine other political parties.
- Uses mobs and demonstrations, and attempts to make individuals working in other parties afraid of violent reactions.
- Advocates ownership of weapons as a fear factor to intimidate others. (Wayne La Pierre…"the people with the guns make the rules.")
- Decides what is best for all citizens based on what corporations want.
- Uses "big lie" propaganda technique, of top-down distributed propaganda message for each issue.
- Allies with military on most issues, with ultra-aggressive military posture.
- Total control of the political process is the ultimate goal.
If any of this seems familiar to you, then you see something "Fascist" in the current political process. Of course, one thing that wasn't mentioned. Fascists always need someone to stigmatize. In Germany, it was the Jews. In Italy it was the Socialists. In Spain it was the Communists. It seems clear that, in this country it is the Democrats.
The Neocons are out of power, but they are unrelenting in their efforts to control as much of the political discourse as possible, no matter how damaging to society. They bring mobs and riff-raff out, some with guns, trying to scare the average citizen. They send messages out over radio with lunatic commentators, some who are not even allowed to visit other countries because of their hate speech…yet we tolerate it.
We even allow asininely preposterous lies from a possibly psychotic television commentator…to be used to stoke the race-hatred of many tea party members, and thugs against a distinguished African-American President who won 54% of the vote, the largest since Ronald Reagan and who also won the Nobel Peace Prize.
The case is pretty clear. The Neoconservative Republicans are headed for Fascism if they are not there already. The latest round of insults, threats, lies, window breakings all contribute to the evidence. Sooner or later this totalitarian attitude will either be denounced or will have serious responses. One thing is sure, with the problems facing our country, we cannot afford the kind of anarchist attacks as were exhibited in the bombing of a Federal building in Oklahoma City or the flying of an aircraft into a building housing an IRS office.
This radical, violent, arrogant Fascist attitude has to stop. The first step in preventing this kind of political outcome is to identify and react to Fascism when it appears. Neoconservative Republicanism is Fascism. Republicans must return to sanity or be treated as a very dangerous and radical political party.
Mike // Mar 30, 2010 at 12:01 pm
I agree with everything you say, except for the statement that the fascists have chosen the Democrats as a focus for hate. They have chosen everyone who is not a fascist republican, and esp. the 'middle to the left', which they label 'liberal'.
It is frightening to see the second party of a two party system turn fascist in the United States. Anyone who says it isn't so, isn't paying attention. What is even more frightening is the level of ignorance that must exist for people to believe those fascists. When you watch that certain mentally mal-adjusted on Fox and see him ramble on incoherently for an hour while he spews lies and distortions, any thinking individual has to ask him/her self "What moron would fall for this drivel?" But they do.
It is truly frightening, and it is easy to see how people like Hitler manage to rise to power, when people wilfully shut off any reasoning skills they ever had.
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Sep 25, 2015 | theguardian.com
skeptikos, 26 Sep 2015 01:05
If you genuinely believe the idiotic Reagan slogan that government is the problem, then shutting it down is not a tactic, it is the objective.
Zepp -> swanstep 26 Sep 2015 00:46
That's already the case. They lost the popular vote overall for the House last year, 52-47, but maintain a fairly large majority of thirty or so seats. Case in point: Pennsylvania, where they lost the overall vote by eight points and won 13 of the 18 seats.
A large and engaged voter turnout could stop this, but that would be asking Americans to get up off their asses and save themselves, and too many of them are convinced that they don't need saving from this sort of thing, because this is America, and it's exceptional!
BaldwinP -> MarkThomason 26 Sep 2015 00:31Excellent analysis.
To which I would add the Tea Party believe very firmly in government in one situation - when they want it to enforce their religious beliefs on everyone else by outlawing abortion and homosexuality.
MelFrontier -> USfan 26 Sep 2015 00:23The Tea Party mysteriously appeared about 10 minutes after Obama's first inauguration. They purported to be a grassroots movement sprung from righteous anger but were in fact a carefully orchestrated anti-liberal, anti-black, anti-Obama initiative funded by Dick Armey's Koch-financed Freedomworks organization.
greven -> hillbillyzombie 25 Sep 2015 22:57
The US paranoia when it comes to government is disturbing. In Europe a government is something they elect to run the country and make sure all the services run smoothly. In the US it seems like it's viewed as a foreign power occupied the country and it has to be fought at all cost.
greven -> dudemanguy 25 Sep 2015 22:53The Koch brothers started the Tea Party as a means to dismantle the state, black lives matter is more borne from desperation.
greven 25 Sep 2015 22:48
Fronting for a party that's desperately trying to dismantle the government totally to give free reign to robber barons must be frustrating. If they succeed the US will see an inequality that makes the current situation look like Scandinavia. Expect 300 million desperately poor people living from hand to mouth with nothing and the number of billionaires double at least.
MarkThomason 25 Sep 2015 22:34What are we going to do if we now discover the House of Representatives is truly broken?
We can and have removed a President. We can and have removed judges.
There is no process to call early elections or remove the House. It is a hole in the Constitution. Nobody imagined this one.
They should have. English history had its share of dysfunctional Houses which had to go:
"You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately ... Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!"
We have no way to do that.
I do hope the two parties can set aside the Hastert Rule and govern without the extreme. If they won't, we are in trouble.
We don't have any good options except to trust them, and they have already betrayed that trust.
Timothy Everton -> Exchief 25 Sep 2015 22:28Wrong! When a woman is forced to carry something inside her body she does wish to, whether by accident, rape, incest, or however, that takes away HER right to pursuit of happiness and more. You damn G.O.PIGS just want a child born but then forget about the nurturing and support it needs after birth. You cut every damn program that exists to help them. No wonder you're an "EX"-chief.
Timothy Everton -> PamelaKatz 25 Sep 2015 22:20Hence, GOP = American Taliban, or worse. And CCarrier is just a blatant demonstration of how single-minded (if minded at all) they have become. Mr. Speaker saw this and knew, in good conscience, that he could not satisfy these hoodlums and govern as was meant to be. Someone quick! Round up the Teabaggers and their ilk and take no prisoners - IF We, The People, want our government to survive.
dudemanguy 25 Sep 2015 22:01I thought the Bush presidency had finished the GOP off, but they were reborn with a phoney wall street funded grass roots movement, the tea party, and are more dangerous and destructive than ever.
The democrats have their own problems as well. The so called blacklivesmatter movement has breathed new life into the Republican party by managing to drive away both democratic moderates tired of being screamed at, bullied and called a racist, and some African Americans whove have been convinced that the only issue that matters is the media driven notion that there is an epidemic of racist killer cops looking for any excuse to kill black people, and every democratic politician that doesn't bow down to a movement that has been responsible for two years of rioting violence and racial strife, is somehow racist. I'm still not convinced the 1% hasnt been fomenting this movement in order to harm the democrats. Is it a coincidence BLM's biggest target has been Bernie Sanders?
In the end the 1% win and the rest of America loses.
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Sep 24, 2015 | TheAntiMedia.org,
For decades, extreme ideologies on both the left and the right have clashed over the conspiratorial concept of a shadowy secret government pulling the strings on the world's heads of state and captains of industry.
The phrase New World Order is largely derided as a sophomoric conspiracy theory entertained by minds that lack the sophistication necessary to understand the nuances of geopolitics. But it turns out the core idea - one of deep and overarching collusion between Wall Street and government with a globalist agenda - is operational in what a number of insiders call the "Deep State."
In the past couple of years, the term has gained traction across a wide swath of ideologies. Former Republican congressional aide Mike Lofgren says it is the nexus of Wall Street and the national security state - a relationship where elected and unelected figures join forces to consolidate power and serve vested interests. Calling it "the big story of our time," Lofgren says the deep state represents the failure of our visible constitutional government and the cross-fertilization of corporatism with the globalist war on terror.
"It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street," he explained.
Even parts of the judiciary, namely the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, belong to the deep state.
How does the deep state operate?A complex web of revolving doors between the military-industrial-complex, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley consolidates the interests of defense contracts, banksters, military actions, and both foreign and domestic surveillance intelligence.
According to Mike Lofgren and many other insiders, this is not a conspiracy theory. The deep state hides in plain sight and goes far beyond the military-industrial complex President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about in his farewell speech over fifty years ago.
While most citizens are at least passively aware of the surveillance state and collusion between the government and the corporate heads of Wall Street, few people are aware of how much the intelligence functions of the government have been outsourced to privatized groups that are not subject to oversight or accountability. According to Lofgren, 70% of our intelligence budget goes to contractors.
Moreover, while Wall Street and the federal government suck money out of the economy, relegating tens of millions of people to food stamps and incarcerating more people than China - a totalitarian state with four times more people than us - the deep state has, since 9/11, built the equivalent of three Pentagons, a bloated state apparatus that keeps defense contractors, intelligence contractors, and privatized non-accountable citizens marching in stride.
After years of serving in Congress, Lofgren's moment of truth regarding this matter came in 2001. He observed the government appropriating an enormous amount of money that was ostensibly meant to go to Afghanistan but instead went to the Persian Gulf region. This, he says, "disenchanted" him from the groupthink, which, he says, keeps all of Washington's minions in lockstep.
Groupthink - an unconscious assimilation of the views of your superiors and peers - also works to keep Silicon Valley funneling technology and information into the federal surveillance state. Lofgren believes the NSA and CIA could not do what they do without Silicon Valley. It has developed a de facto partnership with NSA surveillance activities, as facilitated by a FISA court order.
Now, Lofgren notes, these CEOs want to complain about foreign market share and the damage this collusion has wrought on both the domestic and international reputation of their brands. Under the pretense of pseudo-libertarianism, they helmed a commercial tech sector that is every bit as intrusive as the NSA. Meanwhile, rigging of the DMCA intellectual property laws - so that the government can imprison and fine citizens who jailbreak devices - behooves Wall Street. It's no surprise that the government has upheld the draconian legislation for the 15 years.
It is also unsurprising that the growth of the corporatocracy aids the deep state. The revolving door between government and Wall Street money allows top firms to offer premium jobs to senior government officials and military yes-men. This, says Philip Giraldi, a former counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer for the CIA, explains how the Clintons left the White House nearly broke but soon amassed $100 million. It also explains how former general and CIA Director David Petraeus, who has no experience in finance, became a partner at the KKR private equity firm, and how former Acting CIA Director Michael Morell became Senior Counselor at Beacon Global Strategies.
Wall Street is the ultimate foundation for the deep state because the incredible amount of money it generates can provide these cushy jobs to those in the government after they retire. Nepotism reigns supreme as the revolving door between Wall Street and government facilitates a great deal of our domestic strife:
How did the deep state come to be?"Bank bailouts, tax breaks, and resistance to legislation that would regulate Wall Street, political donors, and lobbyists. The senior government officials, ex-generals, and high level intelligence operatives who participate find themselves with multi-million dollar homes in which to spend their retirement years, cushioned by a tidy pile of investments," said Giraldi.
Some say it is the evolutionary hybrid offspring of the military-industrial complex while others say it came into being with the Federal Reserve Act, even before the First World War. At this time, Woodrow Wilson remarked,
"We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men."
This quasi-secret cabal pulling the strings in Washington and much of America's foreign policy is maintained by a corporatist ideology that thrives on deregulation, outsourcing, deindustrialization, and financialization. American exceptionalism, or the great "Washington Consensus," yields perpetual war and economic imperialism abroad while consolidating the interests of the oligarchy here at home.
Mike Lofgren says this government within a government operates off tax dollars but is not constrained by the constitution, nor are its machinations derailed by political shifts in the White House. In this world - where the deep state functions with impunity - it doesn't matter who is president so long as he or she perpetuates the war on terror, which serves this interconnected web of corporate special interests and disingenuous geopolitical objectives.
"As long as appropriations bills get passed on time, promotion lists get confirmed, black (i.e., secret) budgets get rubber stamped, special tax subsidies for certain corporations are approved without controversy, as long as too many awkward questions are not asked, the gears of the hybrid state will mesh noiselessly," according to Mike Lofgren in an interview with Bill Moyers.
Interestingly, according to Philip Giraldi, the ever-militaristic Turkey has its own deep state, which uses overt criminality to keep the money flowing. By comparison, the U.S. deep state relies on a symbiotic relationship between banksters, lobbyists, and defense contractors, a mutant hybrid that also owns the Fourth Estate and Washington think tanks.
Is there hope for the future?
Perhaps. At present, discord and unrest continues to build. Various groups, establishments, organizations, and portions of the populace from all corners of the political spectrum, including Silicon Valley, Occupy, the Tea Party, Anonymous, WikiLeaks, anarchists and libertarians from both the left and right, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and others are beginning to vigorously question and reject the labyrinth of power wielded by the deep state.
Can these groups - can we, the people - overcome the divide and conquer tactics used to quell dissent? The future of freedom may depend on it.
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The American Conservative,It has frequently been alleged that the modern Turkish Republic operates on two levels. It has a parliamentary democracy complete with a constitution and regular elections, but there also exists a secret government that has been referred to as the "deep state," in Turkish "Derin Devlet."
The concept of "deep state" has recently become fashionable to a certain extent, particularly to explain the persistence of traditional political alignments when confronted by the recent revolutions in parts of the Middle East and Eastern Europe. For those who believe in the existence of the deep state, there are a number of institutional as well as extralegal relationships that might suggest its presence.
Some believe that this deep state arose out of a secret NATO operation called "Gladio," which created an infrastructure for so-called "stay behind operations" if Western Europe were to be overrun by the Soviet Union and its allies. There is a certain logic to that assumption, as a deep state has to be organized around a center of official and publicly accepted power, which means it normally includes senior officials of the police and intelligence services as well as the military. For the police and intelligence agencies, the propensity to operate in secret is a sine qua non for the deep state, as it provides cover for the maintenance of relationships that under other circumstances would be considered suspect or even illegal.
In Turkey, the notion that there has to be an outside force restraining dissent from political norms was, until recently, even given a legal fig leaf through the Constitution of 1982, which granted to the military's National Security Council authority to intervene in developing political situations to "protect" the state. There have, in fact, been four military coups in Turkey. But deep state goes far beyond those overt interventions. It has been claimed that deep state activities in Turkey are frequently conducted through connivance with politicians who provide cover for the activity, with corporate interests and with criminal groups who can operate across borders and help in the mundane tasks of political corruption, including drug trafficking and money laundering.
A number of senior Turkish politicians have spoken openly of the existence of the deep state. Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit tried to learn more about the organization and, for his pains, endured an assassination attempt in 1977. Tansu Ciller eulogized "those who died for the state and those who killed for the state," referring to the assassinations of communists and Kurds. There have been several significant exposures of Turkish deep state activities, most notably an automobile accident in 1996 in Susurluk that killed the Deputy Chief of the Istanbul Police and the leader of the Grey Wolves extreme right wing nationalist group. A member of parliament was also in the car and a fake passport was discovered, tying together a criminal group that had operated death squads with a senior security official and an elected member of the legislature. A subsequent investigation determined that the police had been using the criminals to support their operations against leftist groups and other dissidents. Deep state operatives have also been linked to assassinations of a judge, Kurds, leftists, potential state witnesses, and an Armenian journalist. They have also bombed a Kurdish bookstore and the offices of a leading newspaper.
As all governments-sometimes for good reasons-engage in concealment of their more questionable activities, or even resort to out and out deception, one must ask how the deep state differs. While an elected government might sometimes engage in activity that is legally questionable, there is normally some plausible pretext employed to cover up or explain the act.
But for players in the deep state, there is no accountability and no legal limit. Everything is based on self-interest, justified through an assertion of patriotism and the national interest. In Turkey, there is a belief amongst senior officials who consider themselves to be parts of the status in statu that they are guardians of the constitution and the true interests of the nation. In their own minds, they are thereby not bound by the normal rules. Engagement in criminal activity is fine as long as it is done to protect the Turkish people and to covertly address errors made by the citizenry, which can easily be led astray by political fads and charismatic leaders. When things go too far in a certain direction, the deep state steps in to correct course.
And deep state players are to be rewarded for their patriotism. They benefit materially from the criminal activity that they engage in, including protecting Turkey's role as a conduit for drugs heading to Europe from Central Asia, but more recently involving the movement of weapons and people to and from Syria. This has meant collaborating with groups like ISIS, enabling militants to ignore borders and sell their stolen archeological artifacts while also negotiating deals for the oil from the fields in the areas that they occupy. All the transactions include a large cut for the deep state.
If all this sounds familiar to an American reader, it should, and given some local idiosyncrasies, it invites the question whether the United States of America has its own deep state.
First of all, one should note that for the deep state to be effective, it must be intimately associated with the development or pre-existence of a national security state. There must also be a perception that the nation is in peril, justifying extraordinary measures undertaken by brave patriots to preserve life and property of the citizenry. Those measures are generically conservative in nature, intended to protect the status quo with the implication that change is dangerous.
Those requirements certainly prevail in post 9/11 America, and also feed the other essential component of the deep state: that the intervening should work secretly or at least under the radar. Consider for a moment how Washington operates. There is gridlock in Congress and the legislature opposes nearly everything that the White House supports. Nevertheless, certain things happen seemingly without any discussion: Banks are bailed out and corporate interests are protected by law. Huge multi-year defense contracts are approved. Citizens are assassinated by drones, the public is routinely surveilled, people are imprisoned without be charged, military action against "rogue" regimes is authorized, and whistleblowers are punished with prison. The war crimes committed by U.S. troops and contractors on far-flung battlefields, as well as torture and rendition, are rarely investigated and punishment of any kind is rare. America, the warlike predatory capitalist, might be considered a virtual definition of deep state.
One critic describes deep state as driven by the "Washington Consensus," a subset of the "American exceptionalism" meme. It is plausible to consider it a post-World War II creation, the end result of the "military industrial complex" that Dwight Eisenhower warned about, but some believe its infrastructure was actually put in place through the passage of the Federal Reserve Act prior to the First World War. Several years after signing the bill, Woodrow Wilson reportedly lamented, "We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men."
In truth America's deep state is, not unlike Turkey's, a hybrid creature that operates along a New York to Washington axis. Where the Turks engage in criminal activity to fund themselves, the Washington elite instead turns to banksters, lobbyists, and defense contractors, operating much more in the open and, ostensibly, legally. U.S.-style deep state includes all the obvious parties, both public and private, who benefit from the status quo: including key players in the police and intelligence agencies, the military, the treasury and justice departments, and the judiciary. It is structured to materially reward those who play along with the charade, and the glue to accomplish that ultimately comes from Wall Street. "Financial services" might well be considered the epicenter of the entire process. Even though government is needed to implement desired policies, the banksters comprise the truly essential element, capable of providing genuine rewards for compliance. As corporate interests increasingly own the media, little dissent comes from the Fourth Estate as the process plays out, while many of the proliferating Washington think tanks that provide deep state "intellectual" credibility are similarly funded by defense contractors.
The cross fertilization that is essential to making the system work takes place through the famous revolving door whereby senior government officials enter the private sector at a high level. In some cases the door revolves a number of times, with officials leaving government before returning to an even more elevated position. Along the way, those select individuals are protected, promoted, and groomed for bigger things. And bigger things do occur that justify the considerable costs, to include bank bailouts, tax breaks, and resistance to legislation that would regulate Wall Street, political donors, and lobbyists. The senior government officials, ex-generals, and high level intelligence operatives who participate find themselves with multi-million dollar homes in which to spend their retirement years, cushioned by a tidy pile of investments.
America's deep state is completely corrupt: it exists to sell out the public interest, and includes both major political parties as well as government officials. Politicians like the Clintons who leave the White House "broke" and accumulate $100 million in a few years exemplify how it rewards. A bloated Pentagon churns out hundreds of unneeded flag officers who receive munificent pensions and benefits for the rest of their lives. And no one is punished, ever. Disgraced former general and CIA Director David Petraeus is now a partner at the KKR private equity firm, even though he knows nothing about financial services. More recently, former Acting CIA Director Michael Morell has become a Senior Counselor at Beacon Global Strategies. Both are being rewarded for their loyalty to the system and for providing current access to their replacements in government.
What makes the deep state so successful? It wins no matter who is in power, by creating bipartisan-supported money pits within the system. Monetizing the completely unnecessary and hideously expensive global war on terror benefits the senior government officials, beltway industries, and financial services that feed off it. Because it is essential to keep the money flowing, the deep state persists in promoting policies that make no sense, to include the unwinnable wars currently enjoying marquee status in Iraq/Syria and Afghanistan. The deep state knows that a fearful public will buy its product and does not even have to make much of an effort to sell it.
Of course I know that the United States of America is not Turkey. But there are lessons to be learned from its example of how a democracy can be subverted by particular interests hiding behind the mask of patriotism. Ordinary Americans frequently ask why politicians and government officials appear to be so obtuse, rarely recognizing what is actually occurring in the country. That is partly due to the fact that the political class lives in a bubble of its own creation, but it might also be because many of America's leaders actually accept that there is an unelected, unappointed, and unaccountable presence within the system that actually manages what is taking place behind the scenes. That would be the American deep state.
rehypothecator
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
Martian Moon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3xgjxJwedA
Latest on 911 by James Corbett
Educate yourself
All Risk No Reward
This is all you need to know to prove, beyond all doubt, that the official pile driving narrative is false.
The reality is that anyone can OBSERVE that the top of the building DID NOT DO WHAT A CUE BALL DOES EVERY SINGLE TIME IT HITS ANOTHER BILLIARD BALL - the top of the building did not decelerate.
It did not decelerate because IT DID NOT HIT THE LOWER SECTION OF THE BUILDING. For if it had hit the lower section of the building, IT WOULD HAVE DECELERATED.
The official story never addressed this point. They wisely stopped their investigation at the initiation of collapse. That was no accident.
AitT - Sir Isaac Newton Weighs in on the World Trade Center North Tower Collapse Official Narrative
http://www.weaponsofmassdebt.com/index.php/blog/aitt-sir-isaac-newton-we...
Now, some people will attack either me or this factual, observable, and repeatable information based on their programmed "crimestop" response...
crimestop - Orwell's definition: "The faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. In short....protective stupidity."
http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/ns-dict.html
But what nobody will do - because they can't do it - is to explain a physics based scenario where the top of the building hit a structurally solid lower section of the building WITHOUT DECELERATING.
There are NO CONTRADICTIONS in reality. One leading blogger claimed he had done lots of research that showed the official story was correct.
But what he didn't do before he stopped the conversation (smart subconsciousness!) was to explain how the top of the building could have hit a structurally sound lower section of the building without experiencing marginal deceleration.
This is the video that needs to replace all the complex theories that are too easily dismissed by the masses.
No, make the masses exclaim the physics equivalent of 2+2=5 in order to continue believing in the Debt-Money Monopolist false narratives engineered to damage ordinary people across the globe.
NeoLuddite
Elections are just advance auctions of stolen goods.
junction
"Deep State" operatives killed Michael Hastings and Philip Marshall. Whether Paul Walker was also killed by the "Murder, Inc." - type agents of the "Deep State," to make flaming car crashes look normal, is an open question. When Tennessee Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV)employee Katherine Smith died in a flaming car crash in 2002, her death was called a murder (still unsolved) because a Tennessee state trooper driving behind her saw her car explode into flames before going off the road.
Smith was the DMV employee who sold driver's licenses to Arabs, licenses they used to identify themselves when they did work on the sprinkler systems at the World Trade Center before 9/11.
Sprinkler systems which all did not work on 9/11, even though they were ruggedized after the 1993 WTC truck bombing.
And who can forget the California policeman, on a 100% disability pension, who turned up in Orlando, Florida as the FBI agent who murdered a martial arts associate of Boston Bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev. The guy murdered had just undergone knee surgery and could only walk with a cane, yet he supposedly lunged at this crooked FBI agent, illegally collecting a disabilty pension tax free of some $60,000 a year.
The initial report from the agent said this guy had a sword cane but that report was false.
doctor10
Politics is merely the entertainment wing of the MIC/Anglo-American Central Banking junta.
Has been since November 23rd 1963. Reagan required a 22 cal message to that effect after he thought he'd been elected President.
kliguy38
Of course I know that the United States of America is not Turkey. But there are lessons to be learned from its example of how a democracy can be subverted by particular interests hiding behind the mask of patriotism.
no of course its not Turkey......its a hundred times worse
Ms No
Turkey's deep state is our deep state with some local players. This is going global, I thought everybody knew that. Turkey has been a vassal for the Ziocons as long as anyone can remember and they are one of many. Most of our presidents seem to prefer the term The New World Order. It's funny how people snicker about that term but I didn't catch a grin off of any of our presidents going back to Bush I snickering about it when they mention it in their State of the Union addresses and this current clown is not an exception.
It's quite real and not at all funny. People need to take a look around they have even spelled it out for you. What do these guys have to do send us our own eulogies? Lets just hope that while everybody else is trying to figure this out that we don't end up getting too familiar with our torture state.
Majestic12
"America is in deep shit as are all governments run by central banks neo-Keynesian fascist economic policy."
I got you on the "deep shit" and "run by central banks", but lost you on "Keynesian Fascist economic policy".
ZH is full of half truths and obfuscation.
I do not agree with much of Keynes, but most here support Von Mises (the Rockefeller Foundation product) and the London School of Economics.
These "institutions" are profoundly contradictory, corrupt and were born of the 00001%.
At least Keynes decried relying soley on monetary policy and "supply side" economics.
Most here have only known "supply side" (Reagan and after), so they have nothing to compare it to.
Listen to boomers talk of the 60s and 70s...there were always jobs, it didn't take 2 earners, it didn't take a degree, everyone took vacation, and the "information" deluge ended at 11:00pm until the next morning.
And, you really didn't have to lock your doors, unless you lived in urban Chicago, NY, LA any other huge metropolis.
So, it was all "Keynes"'s fault?
Keynes, who promoted "demand-side" and "fiscal policy"...really? Fascist?
Remember, there are 94 Million people out of the work force...but the poulation is 100 million more than in 1977, and the dollar was worth 70% more.
Salah
Seminal piece on the US 'deep state': http://billmoyers.com/2014/02/21/anatomy-of-the-deep-state/
Why the Clintons & Obama are both CIA No-doubt-about-it.
2nd Big Question: why was the CIA rushed into existence (bill signed in an airplane at end of National Airport by Truman) 45 days after the crash at Roswell?
Freddie
David Rockefeller as a young man was an OSS officer in WW2. Mi6 is the Red Shield.
They are just instruments of terror used by the elites,
Majestic12
"2nd Big Question: why was the CIA rushed into existence 45 days after the crash at Roswell?"
I am glad you asked.....the CIA's involvement was temporary.
The NSA (who now administers the black space program) began as the Armed Forces Security Agency, just 2 years later in 1949.
... ... ...
unitwar
Bill Moyers? I wonder why he doesn't report on those Bilderberg meetings he attends? He reports what he is told to report. Everything he does is a limited hangout.
Usurious
JustObservingthe french called the guillotine the national razor.........just sayin...
monica jewinsky was a honey pot.....
IgnatiusThe Deep State runs everything in America since at least Nov 22, 1963. Kennedy promised to shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds. Instead, the CIA shattered his brains into a thousand pieces.
The NSA spies on the Supreme Court, Congress and the White House and you.
The most extraordinary passage in the memo requires that the Israeli spooks "destroy upon recognition" any communication provided by the NSA "that is either to or from an official of the US government." It goes on to spell out that this includes "officials of the Executive Branch (including the White House, Cabinet Departments, and independent agencies); the US House of Representatives and Senate (members and staff); and the US Federal Court System (including, but not limited to, the Supreme Court)."
The stunning implication of this passage is that NSA spying targets not only ordinary American citizens, but also Supreme Court justices, members of Congress and the White House itself. One could hardly ask for a more naked exposure of a police state.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/09/13/surv-s13.html
Essay: Anatomy of the Deep State
There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power.
http://billmoyers.com/2014/02/21/anatomy-of-the-deep-state/
Who rules America?
The secret collaboration of the military, the intelligence and national security agencies, and gigantic corporations in the systematic and illegal surveillance of the American people reveals the true wielders of power in the United States. Telecommunications giants such as AT&T, Verizon and Sprint, and Internet companies such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter, provide the military and the FBI and CIA with access to data on hundreds of millions of people that these state agencies have no legal right to possess.
Congress and both of the major political parties serve as rubber stamps for the confluence of the military, the intelligence apparatus and Wall Street that really runs the country. The so-called "Fourth Estate"-the mass media-functions shamelessly as an arm of this ruling troika.
It's a big club, and we ain't in it.
jmcoombs
Institutions, left unchecked, eventually come to worship themselves. The Catholic Church during the Spanish Inquisition is a sterling example.
Majestic12
jcdenton"What happened to all those bags of money that were in Iraq that disappeared?"
That was only $8 BBBBBillion in cash....chump change.
Remember last year the DoD stated that they cannot account for $8.5 TTTTTTTTrillion.....
1 Billion = One Thousand Millions.
1 Trillion = One Thousand Billions.
If your head has stopped spinning, then please, tel me....what could they spend $8.5 TTTTrillion on?
Remember, all the wars to date are paid for in the "open" and "public" military budget...so this is "extra"....
Now maybe you can see why some of us here take whistle blowers seriously about a secret space program.
Engineers, secret construction hangars and bases ain't cheap....the shoe fits.
So, there are a shit load of "Amercians" taking a big paycheck to help the elite and off-world assholes plan our demise.
I don't know how you feel about "sell-outs", but they make me think of guillotines.
Some believe that this deep state arose out of a secret NATO operation called "Gladio,"
Well it's more than logical, more than plausible ..
This Deep State arose out of ........................ you figure it out for your own sake, and convince yourself. I'll just assist ..
Directive 166
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/09/22/fraud-on-the-u-s-supreme-court-b...
The Deutsche Verteidigungs Dienst (DVD)
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/05/04/neo-so-much-more-than-nukes/
http://wantarevelations.com/2014/01/wanta-plan-macro-financial-economic-...
Tesla's Assistant
http://www.proliberty.com/observer/20070405.htm
(do a quick search for "Jesuit" and see how many hits you get. Notice who the DVD answer to.)
Go here: https://app.box.com/s/hfgvcqg7gqh7i27at6sv53ywu87lwarp
Go to Rulers of Evil, pg. 170. Start reading from Adam Weishaupt. Now you know the purpose of the creation of the United States of America ..
Ms No
I think Hitler was right about one thing, most people cannot see the big lie, it just seems to complex to them and thus ludicrous. Just look at a small portion of a military you have cores, divisions, brigades, betallions, generals, colonals, companies, Air Force, Navy, Special Forces, intelligence, espionage, propaganda depts, indoctrination depts, etc, all under one umbrella of centralized control.
Is it really that hard to believe that a organized self serving entity who has had plenty of time and very little opposition can grow to a gargantuan empire that nearly global in scale?
Two good reads among at least a hunderd that prove otherwise Sibel Edmonds and Tales of an Economic Hit Man.
tumblemore
"most people cannot see the big lie, it just seems to complex to them"
I think it's more to do with not being sociopaths.
People tend to think other people are like them so say the average person can only tell level 6/10 lies before they feel ashamed then they have a hard time believing other people can tell level 10/10 lies. They couldn't do it themselves so it's hard for them to imagine other people being that shameless - hence the bigger and more shameless the lie the more likely it is to be believed.
Only part-sociopaths can see it.
Ms No
There maybe an element of that occuring because a psychopath can identify another path immediately which would lead one to believe they may be able to identify their activities as well but over all there is something else going on.
There most certainly is something different about people who can go against the grain and challenge common propaganda but it isn't a lack of empathy. Some people are more resistant to indoctrination and we really don't know why. We do know that there has been a large amount of research on and use of subliminal technology and trauma disassociation. I would hazard a guess that there has been a ton of research on this subject that we will probably never see.
tumblemore
JRThe thing about the deep state idea is generally they exist to keep the members in power *and* keep the state in question strong in the long-term so that power is worth something.
What's odd about the US deep state is it doesn't seem to care about the long term at all and seems only really interested in selling America piece by piece.
For example from their behavior it's pretty blatant now that lobbyists have bought the GOP's foreign policy position but the dark side of that is it probably means every other aspect of policy is for sale also.
It's like the US deep state is living off the capital rather than the interest.
"On 9/11/2001, America received its new Pearl Harbor"…to strike fear into the hearts of Americans and pave the way for the perpetrators' profitable and soul-destroying global "war on terror"... Enough is enough! "There are at least 8.5 trillion reasons to investigate the money trail of 9/11" and to end the perversion of law that has bolstered the power of those who hold the reins in Washington, DC, and use the law, perverted, as a weapon for every kind of global control and personal greed!
NEW VIDEO: 9/11 Trillions: Follow The Money
One of the best documentaries on 9/11... "The first suspects of a big crime should be those who benefit from it."
Published on Sep 11, 2015
TRANSCRIPT, SOURCES AND MP3: https://www.corbettreport.com/?p=16167
"Forget for one moment everything you've been told about September 11, 2001. 9/11 was a crime. And as with any crime, there is one overriding imperative that detectives must follow to identify the perpetrators: follow the money. This is an investigation of the 9/11 money trail."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3xgjxJwedA&feature=youtu.be
RichardParker
Engagement in criminal activity is fine as long as it is done to protect the Turkish people...
I call bullshit on this one. More like engagement in criminal activity is fine as long as it is done to preserve/enhance the Turkish government's power.
ddsoffice
Ja, diese ist eine gutte fragge. Aber, es ist wie die 'Jetzt Neue Deutschland' uber alles vielleicht seit WWI! (Yes, this is a good topic. But, it is like the 'New Germany Now' perhaps since WWI!)
(laughing now that I still remember some of my high school German lessons over 25 years ago.)
Eine Gutte Fragge. (A good topic)
Sehr Gut. (Very good)
Jetz Deuschtland ober alles. (Now Germany over all)
krage_man
There are various terms for this - deep state, elite, etc.
But ultimately, current political system so-called democracy is far from original definition of democracy. And I dont mean that original "greek" democracy is the better one.
This is a feature of modern democracy to pretend to be old-fashioned peoples democracy. This is to make sure people do feel their power to elect (ans they have it to a degree)
This is a feature of modern democracy to have 2-3 alternative parties. Each is more attractive to a certain human personality category. This way each can find something to associate with and be associated against. This means satisfaction of citizens with having a choice even though the choice is created for them based on 2-3 major types of their personalities.
All 2-3 parties are really backed by this deep state or elite institution which manages all things behand the curtain. For instance, foreign policy basixally ghe same no matter which party has power.
Political elected officcials do not really manage the affairs, they commmunicate but the final decisions are not theirs but come deep from the state departments which are receiving instructions from deep state.
Elected president is supervised by a vise president with direct access to deep state. He would take state affairs in his hands if the president is not cooperaring or incapacited ( could be related)
Deep state controls 95% of mass media via proxy corporations. A special mass-media department of the deep state issues directives to the editors of mainstream TV/news media. This department coordinates with other depaetments like one managing foreign affairs linked or even located in official state department. One may notice a delay when a certain major events take place and mass media delays reporting by 24-48 hours while waiting for the right spin of the reporting to the nation.
Latitude25
Interesting that Turkey is mentioned. When I was in college my room mate was a Turkish guy who was definitely from the .001%, second richest family in Turkey. He said that turkey has 100s of years of experience keeping the masses occupied with one war or another and that the economy could not run without it. He also liked chasing the most beautiful blondes he could find and with his money he sure found them.
Burticus
"The few who understand the system will either be so interested in its profits or be so dependent upon its favours that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests." - Rothschild Brothers of London
withglee
Ordinary Americans frequently ask why politicians and government officials appear to be so obtuse, rarely recognizing what is actually occurring in the country.
Ordinary Americans are clueless ... witness less than 8% know anything about WTC7.
That notwithstanding, government officials "appear" to be obtuse to what is going on in the country because they "are" obtuse. At the Federal level, at best, a representative speaks for 500,000 people. He can't know those people and they can't know him.
Our system is a "fake" representative democracy. What we get is what we should expect from such a charade.
ISEEIT
"Deep State America"?
FRAUD is the singular truth. Deception, corruption.
"Rational actor" absent philosophically (and with increasing clarity, empirically via what little remains of classical scientific method)..a once socially respected 'norm' of ethics.
Morality has become hostage to maniacal narcissism. World "leaders" are simply apparatchiks of the now fully globalized machinations of failing souls.
History is repeating itself.
All indications are that death is just fine. Inevitable...
It's just the dying part that causes pain.
NuYawkFrankie
re In truth America's deep state (...) operates along a New York to Washington axis.
In an even bigger truth America's deep state (...) operates along a New York to Washington to TEL AVIV axis
- FIXED
Atomizer
Time to go to bed Zero Hedge family. Mrs. Atomizer is getting cranky for me to shut off the computer. I wanted to leave you with a Friday night boost of laughter. turn up the volume. See you bitchez in the morning!
Mortgage Thrift Shop (Macklemore WALL STREET parody ...
Usurious
good nite
John Coltrane
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmD16eSy-Mg
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Jul 10, 2015 | The Guardian
The largest association of psychologists in the United States is on the brink of a crisis, the Guardian has learned, after an independent review revealed that medical professionals lied and covered up their extensive involvement in post-9/11 torture. The revelation, puncturing years of denials, has already led to at least one leadership firing and creates the potential for loss of licenses and even prosecutions.
For more than a decade, the American Psychological Association (APA) has maintained that a strict code of ethics prohibits its more than 130,000 members to aid in the torture of detainees while simultaneously permitting involvement in military and intelligence interrogations. The group has rejected media reporting on psychologists' complicity in torture; suppressed internal dissent from anti-torture doctors; cleared members of wrongdoing; and portrayed itself as a consistent ally against abuse.
Now, a voluminous independent review conducted by a former assistant US attorney, David Hoffman, undermines the APA's denials in full – and vindicates the dissenters.
Sources with knowledge of the report and its consequences, who requested anonymity to discuss the findings before public release, expected a wave of firings and resignations across the leadership of an organization that Hoffman finds used its extensive institutional links to the CIA and US military to facilitate abusive interrogations.
... ... ...
Substantial sections of the report focus on the APA ethics chief and describes Behnke's "behind-the-scenes attempts to manipulate Council of Representatives actions in collusion with, and to remain aligned with DoD" – a reference to the Department of Defense.
A University of Michigan-pedigreed psychologist, Behnke has held his position within the APA since 2000, and, according to sources, used it to stifle dissent. Hoffman's report found Behnke ghostwrote statements opposing member motions to rebuke torture; was involved in voter irregularity on motion passings; spiked ethics complaints; and took other actions to suppress complaints.
... ... ...
Behnke was hardly the only psychologist involved in the establishment and application of torture.
According to two landmark Senate reports, one from the armed services committee in 2009 and the other from the intelligence committee in 2014, psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were instrumental in persuading the CIA to adopt stress positions, temperature and dietary manipulation, sleep deprivation and waterboarding in interrogations. (Neither man is an APA member.)
Psychologists assigned to the CIA's office of medical services assisted abusive interrogations, which the Guardian revealed in June appear to violate longstanding CIA rules against human experimentation.
Those tactics, save waterboarding, spread from the CIA to the military. Psychologists joined "behavioral science consultation teams" that advised interrogations at Guantánamo Bay.
... ... ...
Yet the organization withstood all public criticism, until New York Times reporter James Risen revealed, based in part on a hoard of emails from a deceased behavioral-science researcher named Scott Gerwehr, the behind-the-scenes ties between psychologists from the APA and their influential counterparts within the CIA and the Pentagon.
In 2002 – the critical year for the Bush administration's embrace of torture – the APA amended its longstanding ethics rules to permit psychologists to follow a "governing legal authority" in the event of a conflict between an order and the APA ethics code.
Without the change, Risen wrote in his 2014 book Pay Any Price, it was likely that psychologists would have "taken the view that they were prevented by their own professional standards from involvement" in interrogations, making it "far more difficult for the Justice Department to craft opinions that provided the legal approvals needed for the CIA to go ahead with the interrogation tactics".
In 2004, after the Abu Ghraib torture scandal burst into public view, the emails detailed a private meeting of APA officials with CIA and military psychologists to "provide input on how the APA should deal with the growing furor", Risen wrote.
Ethics chief Behnke emailed: "I would like to emphasize that we will not advertise the meeting other than this letter to the individual invitees, that we will not publish or otherwise make public the names of attendees or the substance of our discussions, and that in the meeting we will neither assess nor investigate the behavior of any specific individual or group."
Risen went on to report that six of the 10 psychologists on the seminal 2005 APA taskforce "had connections with the defense or intelligence communities; one member was the chief psychologist for US Special Forces". The subject of tremendous internal controversy, the APA ultimately rescinded the taskforce report in 2013.
In October, the APA called Risen's account "largely based on innuendo and one-sided reporting". Yet the next month the association announced it had asked Hoffman to investigate potential "collusion with the Bush administration to promote, support or facilitate the use of 'enhanced' interrogation techniques by the United States in the war on terror".
Throughout the controversy, the APA has preferred to treat criticism of its involvement in torture, either from journalists or from human rights-minded psychologists, with dismissal. Its internal investigations of the criticisms have typically ended up exonerating its members.
"A thorough review of these public materials and our standing policies will clearly demonstrate that APA will not tolerate psychologist participation in torture," the APA communications chief, Rhea Farberman, told the Guardian in January 2014, after the Guardian revealed that an APA inquiry declined to pursue charges against a psychologist involved in the Guantánamo Bay torture of Mohammed al-Qahtani.
The psychologist, former US army reserve major John Leso, took part in a brutal interrogation of Qahtani, the suspected intended 20th 9/11 hijacker, according to a leaked interrogation log and investigation by the Senate armed services committee.
Interrogators extensively deprived Qahtani of sleep, forced him to perform what the log called "dog tricks", inundated him with loud music for extended periods, and forcibly hydrated him intravenously until he urinated on himself.
"The concern that APA's decision to close the matter against Dr John Leso will set a precedent against disciplining members who participate in abusive interrogations is utterly unfounded," the APA's Farberman told the Guardian in January 2014.
Apteryx05 10 Jul 2015 22:05If these doctors are guilty as alleged, then why aren't Bush, Cheney and the rest of their cabal of war criminals facing prosecution?
WatchEm 10 Jul 2015 22:04
Just the APA?? Of course elements of their APA membership are torturers - and they know this only too well. Don't leave out 'psychologists' who are not APA members and get profitable government contracts to develop 'better ways to torture'...
Add psychiatrists, 'government employees', mercenary profit centers aka 'contractors', police officers with torture expertise, the alphabet soup of government agencies and purported humans from the rank of major to general. The latter being directors and instigators of torture where a number of them were promoted for their efficiency in the finer arts of torture.
At the lower echelons of torture are military cannon fodder who are often assigned blame and have been known to be prosecuted. Just watch a few tapes of them speaking on camera and it's easy to see thru them - ranging from just sad to being control freaks. They are what is known as the "few bad apples" in the barrel full of bad apples.
There is no such thing as an old torturer... Add a few criminal retirees with long track records of torture and experience of slaughtering men, women and children. They were pulled out of retirement to show their expertise in the killing, torture and operating death squads - paid for by the US taxpayer.
Never leave out US 'ambassadors' who magically appear like bees to a honeypot when torture is in the air - e.g. Negropointe is an example of a US 'torture ambassador' with considerable experience in the slaughtering, torture and particularly in the rapes of innocent people. His latest skill set extends to being a diplomat for death squads.
In the Washington swamp there are the legal lemmings specialising in opinions of torture. All legal opinions are, of course, simply to support the rear ends of policy makers on torture - and their non-legal opinions violate the Convention against Torture and literally every human rights and crimes against humanity treaty ever ratified by the USG.
At the top of the pack of cards are the policy makers - Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, the Black Widow Pianist, Wolfowitz and other self-relevant sickos, plus circa 400-500 of their I'm-very-innocent sycophants from almost every department of government. They will explain how torture is not torture - despite a written policy on torture. Needless to say, the travel opportunities of this group outside US jurisdiction is somewhat restricted.
Not unsurprisingly, US society is marinated in this vermin and some of them are pillars of society - e.g. college deans et al. Dysfunctional, corrupt and criminal would be an understatement. In most other nations with a real functioning justice system, most of this swamp with the vermin of humanity would be in jail cells.
The APA? Hell they are just a segment of a torture regime...
JinTexas -> Haynonnynonny 10 Jul 2015 22:03
In light of this:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/02/ndaa-historic-assault-american-liberty
How would we know if they've stopped doing it or not?
rfs2014 -> Slo27 10 Jul 2015 22:03
no, doctors are the worst. it's their job to help people. not so with lawyers.
dakaygees -> Haynonnynonny 10 Jul 2015 22:02
Which US was able to correct it self by condemning torture? You must be living on another planet.
TheBBG 10 Jul 2015 22:01
The Americans need Tony Abbott and his far right wing Liberal-Fascist Party for salvation. He will show them how to make it legal to torture and illegal to tell anyone about it, first or second hand.
bobliv -> Haynonnynonny 10 Jul 2015 22:00
Read the White Rabbit by Bruxe Marahall, just a variation on theme.
rfs2014 -> Lex Lozano 10 Jul 2015 22:00
by that logic, you should have no problem with terrorists capturing and torturing american armed services personnel (whose main goal may be to kill as many terrorists as possible).
the geneva conventions are there for a reason - each side believes it's right, so we need some basic standards by which to conduct ourselves in times of war. not torturing the other side is a good place to start.
Athell -> William Brown 10 Jul 2015 21:58
Of course, any fascist surveillance state considers everyone a threat
Athell -> Haynonnynonny 10 Jul 2015 21:57
Ha ha ha true - but I just think he was trying to compare the level of atrocities committed by the nazis to the one committed by the US government since the Bush years - and perpetuated by the Obama administration
Athell alverta 10 Jul 2015 21:55
Yeah, that bunch of criminals have evaded justice for many years.
Haynonnynonny 10 Jul 2015 21:55
In the history of humanity, all nations will torture, and fall from good character: only some, unlike the US teeter there longer, stay there, or go so far off the deep end they end up like Nazi Germany, or the Soviets. That the US was able to correct its self, and condemn the torture, and move on, drives many mad.
tomjoadmcalister 10 Jul 2015 21:53
Psychologists are not medical professionals. Why does the Guardian keep mistakenly referring to them as such? This habitual error casts doubt on the credibility of this and related articles.
en1gm4 -> MondoFundi 10 Jul 2015 21:53
Bingo. Democracy, rule of law etc is just a charade. In reality the rulers of today are no different than those of years ago. We're just compliant because we have a little version of freedom. So they keep us happy whilst they do what they want.
Maybe some time in the future justice will prevail but for now nothing is going to happen.
Haynonnynonny kowalli 10 Jul 2015 21:51
The Nazi never water boarded any one. If you get a chance, stop by your local library, and get a history book.
alverta 10 Jul 2015 21:44
Start with Bush. Cheney, Rummie and Condi first... Add in Wolfie and all who are already signed on to advise Jebbie.
Mansa Mahmoud gastinel1 10 Jul 2015 21:42US foreign policy is dictated by US corporate interests. Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany (prior to WW1) were focused on colonization. Under the colonization model, the European countries owned the colonized countries and extracted resources and cheap labor to support the 'Home' economy.
America (aside from Okinawa Japan, Phillipinnes, Guam) prefers not to maintain direct control. Rather america installs puppets; the purpose of the puppets is to make it easy for american companies to exploit the resources of the proxy (via puppets) controlled nations. During the cold war, the USSR wasted resources in trying to finance and manage warsaw pact nations. The USSR did it (partially) for ideological reasons. USA focused on maintaining proxy control and creating access to cheap resources for american companies. That is the entire premise of globalization.. it enables an american (by brand only) company to access cheap labor and provides said company with access to a world of consumers.
Once you understand that fundamental concept, then american foreign policy makes absolute sense. America is run for the benefit of the big dollar people; nothing less, nothing more. Read the book "Confessions of a Hit Man".
kowalli 10 Jul 2015 21:39
nazi at the full face. USA are bunch of nazi
William Brown StuartBooth 10 Jul 2015 21:37
The U.S. Government considers its own citizens a threat. That's why they spy.
Brian Lippe 10 Jul 2015 21:37
Typical. They should start with Cheney if they're going to prosecute anyone and spread out from there. He's still saying it was OK!
StuartBooth 10 Jul 2015 21:34
American Exceptionalism allows Americans carte blanch to commit any crime against foreigners. Like standing on a cockroach.
Alistair73 10 Jul 2015 21:30
Lets not forget all the commie regimes... Stalin and Lenin, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot, Kim Jong Un and his daddy and grand daddy, and now Maduro in Venezuela, Castro in Cuba, Mugabe in Zimbabwe. You would think the left would embrace state sanctioned torture since it has been relentlessly practiced by all of its heroes.
camerashy 10 Jul 2015 21:24
Every god damn single one of these psychopaths must prosecuted and put behind bars! No apologies should be accepted. They're nothing but human scum!
philbertdelamorgue -> Trig Satyr 10 Jul 2015 21:22
the APA has a code of ethics, modelled after the Hippocratic oath. these psychologists violated that code of ethics, and then the APA took steps to protect them, at the expense of their own ethical code. that's the problem, independent of the guilt or innocence of the people tortured.
gastinel1 -> Mansa Mahmoud 10 Jul 2015 21:21
I appreciate what you are saying, however US foreign policy adopted the theme of 'America First' long before Bush and Cheney. This policy runs counter to its own stated values of freedom and democracy because it necessitates ensuring compliance from other regimes to American capitalist aspirations.
confettifoot -> libbyliberal 10 Jul 2015 21:19
It's a hard education. The best among us recoil; it breaks the heart and poisons everything, knowing. That's the problem. It wasn't so long ago that the Nazis discovered the same - make it so awful that no one can quite wrap their mind around it, so atrocious that it can't be discussed at table, so ugly that passing the information feels like assault. Make it very expensive to resist, make it life-wrecking - someone suggested that we stop paying taxes. That won't catch on. It's not just America. The world is full of good Nazis, frowning silently into the middle distance. We're all deploring like crazy in here. Who among is is actually doing something?
photosymbiosis 10 Jul 2015 21:13
One question here - what about the use of psychoactive / neuroleptic drugs in interrogation? Was that used? I just ask because those few Gitmo detainees seen in public so far have that kind of nodding dazed drooling expression of the lithium / tricyclic / SSRI victim of excessive drug treatment - nodding, dazed, stumbling, etc? Have they been doing drug-based interrogation on top of the waterboarding?
confettifoot -> Jake Wilson 10 Jul 2015 21:11
Pogo. You know. "I have seen the enemy...".
confettifoot -> pogomutt 10 Jul 2015 21:10
I don't want my life purchased by torture. I agree with those who don't believe that it saves anyone, anyway, but come down to it? I'm radical. Don't want to live in a world in which torture is"just n case" standard procedure. Sorry. Ends don't justify means. Appeal to self-interest here is shabby and false.
fairandreasonabletoo 10 Jul 2015 21:06The spirit of one Doctor Josef Mengele……….found its way to America with all the other NAZI baggage….
It would seem?
gastinel1 10 Jul 2015 21:05Its interesting isn't it, how governments justify torture. The Nazis were convinced that they needed to weed out dissidents and spies by any means possible. When the Allies occupied Germany, suspected Nazis were also given a very rough time. Those post war interrogators gained a lot of 'useful' experience and that has really formed the basis of postwar interrogation techniques - human rights be damned.
gastinel1 10 Jul 2015 20:57
They could have saved themselves a bit of money by recruiting NCO's from the British Army who served in Northern Ireland. They know all the techniques. To be fair to the UK Government, they did apologise. But then again, why did the UK go back to doing it with the Americans? What values did they say they are protecting?
CostaParkiMik -> Emily Pulane 10 Jul 2015 20:54
such sincerity ..... while forgetting that your lot were the illegal invading force operating in the interests of corporations and zionist interests.... who had spent years degrading the public infrastructure of a sovereign nations causing the deaths of many hundreds and thousands of women, children the old and the sick.
libbyliberal 10 Jul 2015 20:52
In Jan. 2014 I attended a "World Can't Wait"-sponsored NYC forum on Gitmo and a screening of "Doctors on the Dark Side" directed by psychologist Martha Davis.
Todd Pierce, who had been a Gitmo prisoner lawyer, said that our society expects professional people to exhibit high ethical standards. This has not been the case and an alarming number has colluded with the amoral Bush administration's torture program.
From the film I learned about the horrific tortures some ended by the Obama adm. and SOME NOT at Gitmo!
Temperature extremes, sensory deprivation, 24 hour flourescent lighting, 24 hour sustained assaultive noise, solitary confinement, riot squad attacks and punchouts with night sticks, sleep deprivation, aggressive force feeding, genital mutilation, sexual degradation, threats to kill a prisoner's family members, manipulation with drugs, stress positions, organ-damaging, bone-breaking sustained shackling and suspension from vulnerable body parts, withholding of appropriate and timely medical care, the infamous water boarding, etc. ETCETERA!!!
I also learned that having military personnel present motivated torturers to push torture to nth degree. Emergency tracheotomies at times had to be conducted on prisoners who had been zealously waterboarded. In spite of medical personnel present at least 100 prisoners were "inadvertently" tortured to death. Medical personnel were then pressured to falsify death certificates to cover up such mistakes.
UK's Andy Worthington spoke of not only the number of wrong place/wrong time innocent men rendered and tortured but how Obama's promises of release and then betrayals is a spiritual torture that has resulted in profound despair and even suicides. How the US Congress is heartless about Gitmo, wanting to posture as tough on terror and Pentagon issues propaganda about recidivism rates to back them up.
Worthington said Obama has decided to kill people with drones instead of use capture and imprisonment. Once again, innocent lives are destroyed with this reckless program.
Debra Sweet of WCW said instead of trying to win foreign hearts and minds the US is instead traumatizing and terrorizing foreign hearts and minds (and radicalizing them) with its draconian detention and torture programs.
Torture begats false confessions which the Bush administration used to justify its war.
Mitchell and Jenner who reversed the SERE program and set up the advanced interrogation program Worthington disclosed are now covered by a $5 million defense fund provided by CIA against attempts at liability and accountability. Mitchell was the one who decided one prisoner be waterboarded 83 times!
creweman 10 Jul 2015 20:50Who wants to bet that the maximum penalty imposed on any individual will be nothing more than a slap on the wrist? The United States Of Hypocrisy will see to that.
CostaParkiMik Urgelt 10 Jul 2015 20:47"....There are no such pressures on the FBI or the Attorney General to do their jobs and enforce the law....."
I could imagine with white man, intellectual arrogance that they saw it as part of their "mission" to maintain and spread all that's good and right about the American way and do away with threats to that mission..... self righteous neo christian nazis.F H Dar 10 Jul 2015 20:46
21st Centuries truly Savage State, which a 'special relationship' with Britain?
reto 10 Jul 2015 20:44It's a little like the death penalty... I don't really care what they do to terrorists who have carried out attacks and killed innocent people but do really hope they only do it to people who are guilty. What is clear is that the guy who is actually torturing is crazy afterwards. As for the APA... this organisation is so awash with group think and peudo-expertise I doubt they have found out anything at all despite their many "experiments". Being a scientist requires a minimum IQ. Look, if you actually can find out things using torture, why not have it in your arsenal but experience after 9/11 (see Senate report), the last couple of hundred years and the inquisition seems to suggest that it doesn't work well for most purposes. Names are just codes these days and aren't that important anymore in a cell command structure.
BrianHarry 10 Jul 2015 20:24
If medical professionals were coerced into lying about torture after 9/11, it's not to hard to imagine that the N.I.S.T. report(the official explanation of what happened on 9/11) is also a lie.
The question is, "Who in government, CIA, FBI, etc, found it necessary to coerce these people into lying"? And Why?
PamelaKatz JohnML2015 10 Jul 2015 20:15The APA is currently lobbying the AMA (American Medical Association) and Congress to be permitted to prescribe and dispense drugs used to treat psychological/psychiatric disorders. Unless the APA outs every single one of these guys and kicks them out of APA permanently, yanks their licenses, and gets rid of every member of their Association's Board of Governors who 'covered up' these ethical breaches, no psychologist should be eligible for insurance reimbursement. Nothing happens until you hit the pocketbooks of the whole community.
1cjcarpenter 10 Jul 2015 20:14
In my opinion the APA and its members lost the majority of their credibility well before any CIA involvement. The 1995 Little Rascals day care trials, for a start, showed a degree of irresponsibility that I would have labeled criminal.
pogomutt 10 Jul 2015 20:13
"Community standards" What a fucking joke. The American Psychological Association came out with a position paper only a few years back that classified the rape of children by homosexuals as an "orientation". It's TRUE, Guardian! Live with it!
ID5175635 FancyFootwork 10 Jul 2015 20:00
A bit overboard, don't you think? APA is an organization. Some in that organization may be guilty of wrongdoing. The vast majority of APA members are psychologists who work in schools, workplaces, universities, for NASA, the DOD, and other workplaces and have no relationship with torture in any manner.
Michael Williams 10 Jul 2015 20:00
Right. Blame the doctors. Not the people giving the orders.
When Bush hangs, then we can worry about the doctors.
Barry_Seal franzbonsema 10 Jul 2015 19:57
They have domestic assassination squads and NSA surveillance teams to deal with any prosecutors who get any funny ideas which might threaten "national security"
Barry_Seal 10 Jul 2015 19:52
The CIA is absolutely untouchable. They are the law and they are the true government of the USA. They cannot and will not be prosecuted for anything. This is not because they never do anything illegal; it is because they are the government agency tasked with doing that which is illegal. This is the true reason why the CIA must necessarily be so secretive - nearly everything they become involved with is a grave legal and moral crime.
Angelaaaa Brucetopher 10 Jul 2015 19:51Probably because alcohol, drugs and so-called "truth serums" don't actually deliver the truth. They just lower inhibitions. As anyone who has listened to chemically-enhanced stream-of-consciousness rambling will gather. You may get some truth (Grandma smells ... ) but probably no razor-sharp insights.
Of course, torture doesn't deliver the truth either. Just for other reasons.
The point that no one in power ever wants to acknowledge is that the most reliable way to get the truth is from someone who really wants to deliver it.
Bankhead 10 Jul 2015 19:50Is it correct to refer to psychologists as part of the medical community? The writer perhaps should distinguish between Psychiatrists (medical doctors) and Psychologists (PhDs). As I recall, the Psychiatric professional association(s) were demonstrably against participation in military interrogation during the period in question.
Denial, however, is a term familiar to both professions. There is an irony on display here, and not a small amount of hubris.
Haggala Jeffrey_Harrison 10 Jul 2015 19:40When the Americans were accused of torture after the world saw the Abu Ghraib images, the American administration to let themselves off the hook just redefined the terminology.
And that is what humanity does to allow itself to make the same mistakes of the past, it changes the definition unconsciously mostly but in the Abu Ghraib situation that was a conscious change.
And still GTMO is in operation where there are still untried prisoners being interrogated, where we may wonder is the beast we fight actually the image in the mirror
Angelaaaa synchronicfusion 10 Jul 2015 19:39No. It's a fairly straightforward definition of the difference between a psychologist and a psychiatrist - the terms are not interchangeable.
The difference is important because psychologists want desperately to be acknowledged as "doctors" (Mengele notwithstanding) - rather than expensive crackpots for the chattering classes. To that end, their organisations adopt similar ethical commitments. However, unlike psychiatrists, joining these organisations is voluntary. And even if they kick out a member, that psychologist can still hang out a shingle and continue counselling, regardless of whether s/he is guilty of government-sanctioned torture, sleeping with patients or just really bad at the job.
Psychiatrists however, as doctors, can be stripped of the right to practice if they are proven to be incompetent or unethical.
ro2124 Will D 10 Jul 2015 19:34Indeed if it was some African dictator Mr Yankee would be screaming for justice!
Still guess we should not be surprised after all the illegal wars, torture, lies, illegal gathering of information by the NSA and the way their police forces are behaving at the moment gunning down unarmed people like there was no tomorrow.
The Yanks have absolutely no credibility left whatsoever !!
But, hell when someone exposes the truth like Mr Snowden then they fall over themselves and scream about justice, etc what a bunch of damn hypocrites!
FancyFootwork 10 Jul 2015 19:30
Finally, those righteous and morally upright men and women, who for a very long time cried foul very loudly will feel vindicated that an upcoming report by an investigator, who was personally chosen by the brass of the APA is slated to point fingers at the organization, its leadership and members.
The report will blast a bombshell, which will be seriously consequential to the livelihood, reputation and possibly freedom of many in the APA, which includes the elite brass, who where involved with the Bush Administration by schooling, aiding and abetting its its principal torturing institution: The CIA
Now the APA will forever be decidedly linked with Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Who can forget the image of the imprisoned man at Abu Ghraib, kneeling on the floor, hands tied and been stared at eye level by a barking German Shepherd, which looked ready to bite and sever his head from his body. The horror displayed by the man was unsettling. How about the image of a hooded person in a black robe, arms spread, standing to look like enduring crucifixion? And the APA will also be forever lined with the term WATERBOARDING.
This is an institution that was entrusted to use the science of psychology to safeguard the mental and psychological health of Americans. Instead, it used its knowledge and power to do to engage in morally and ethically reprehensible acts of torture.
No doubt, the anticipated report will provide tremendous moral and political boost to those, who endured years of humiliation, rebuke, ridicule and even threats to their livelihood for opposing torture in all its forms. They will come back swinging with a swagger, aiming and hoping for a grand slam. My hope is that, once the necessary number of APA heads are bashed, the momentum will shift to go after Bush Administration officials Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, the former president himself and many other big fish, or small minnows that were involved in the CIA torture program.
Now, that will be quiet an event bigger in scale to the impeachment of former President Nixon, who by comparison committed far lesser reprehensible act than George W Bush and cohorts
Ali Kerrouzi 10 Jul 2015 19:27
And then they wander why USA is hated all over the world, Bush's administration is partly responsible what's happening in Iraq now and Syria, Bush & Blair made our world more dangerous created more terrorism they get away with it in this life but they will have to answer God on the judgment day for the blood on their hand, the torture, millions of refugees
IntoOblivion 10 Jul 2015 19:26
Better late than never. Many of us already knew what "enhanced interrogation techniques" really meant, an euphemism for terrorism. And that "responsible and humane medical practices" were never compatible with "EIT".
That doesn't mean that the ones who ordered the torture are not the ones we should really blame and that should face justice. But doctors were also aware of what they were doing.Bklynite53 10 Jul 2015 19:23
Why do they always go after the bottom feeders first. Time to start at the top and that means the commander-in - chief.
talenttruth Juan Olmo (MOSAICOS COQUI') 10 Jul 2015 19:19I HOPE that this is satire. If so, funny. If not . . .
The "war" against terrorism is an INVENTED FANTASY LIE, by the U.S. military industrial complex, to waste American's money, even beyond the 53% of our ENTIRE national budget going to Eternal War (and huge eternal profits for the criminals behind the "war industry".)
Yes there are insane "terrorists." And they have insane, sociopathic leaders and lost, borderline personality "followers." But the American response (all for PROFITS) is to turn everything into a fear/fear/fear 24/7 "War."
The Republicans are the paid representative of the Eternal War Profits machine.
Having the APA support Bush, or any other criminal who kills hundreds of thousands of people, just to further enrich themselves, is despicable. And Yichen Hu is partly right, Bush, Cheney, Halliburton's entire board and a host of other criminals should have been prosecuted for war crimes years ago.
Theodore Svedberg Laudig 10 Jul 2015 18:58
True psychologists are not physicians. However, there were a number of "real" physicians, i.e. AMA accredited doctors, that worked at Guantanomo who monitored the health of torture victims and alerted the interrogators that their subjects were close to death and they did two things: stopped the torture and then treated the victims back beyond the verge of death. At that point the torturers could resume their "interrogation". We know this was happening. So far these doctors names have not been revealed.
If the APA is now cleaning house on their torturer enablers maybe it is about time for the AMA to start looking into the "real" doctors that were part of this system.
ro2124 Brucetopher 10 Jul 2015 18:57
>Why do elaborate, horrendously painful, cruel and vicious actions need >to be undertaken
No doubt some are sadists and enjoy it and as any real interrogator knows, evidence under torture is mostly useless. If someone wired up my dangly bits to the mains, I am sure I would confess anything from eating babies for breakfast to being the best mate of Osama Bin Liner!
and the Yanks still insist on lecturing the rest of us about morals and the "Land of the Free" and all the other bullshit they like to spout ...but slowly we are seeing what a bunch of hypocrite F**** they really are!
Littlemissv norecovery 10 Jul 2015 18:51Here is a comment from JCDavis with some important information:
Russ Tice revealed that the NSA was spying on Obama as early as 2004 at the behest of Dick Cheney, who had already convinced the NSA's director Hayden to break the law and spy on everyone with power.
It can't be any coincidence that President Obama went (or was sent) to Bill "Cheney is the best Republican" Kristol to get his foreign policy validated, and Kristol congratulated him on it, calling him a "born-again neocon."
And it is no coincidence that Obama has the Cheney protegee Victoria Nuland in his administration, right in the center of his new cold war with Russia. And no coincidence that she is the wife of neocon Robert Kagan, who with Bill Kristol founded PNAC. PNAC counts neocon Paul Wolfowitz as a member, who saw Russia as our main obstacle to world empire.
It's a nest of neocons running Obama as a puppet and pushing us into a confrontation with Russia while smashing all the Russian allies according to the Wolfowitz doctrine.
Littlemissv -> marydole 10 Jul 2015 18:46
the US and it's partners in crime turn around and say "gee how come all these folks got radicalised and are out to kill us"?
Gore Vidal explained why very well back in 2002 in his book, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated
Littlemissv -> ID8918386 10 Jul 2015 18:41
I'm reminded of the work of R J Lifton
Yes! Lifton appeared on Democracy Now two months ago: Robert Jay Lifton, Author of "The Nazi Doctors": Psychologists Who Aided Torture Should Be Charged
Everyone should watch Amy Goodman's terrific interview with the 89-year-old, and very wise Lifton.
gtggtg -> IanCPurdie 10 Jul 2015 18:29
"I think you will find the USA has exempted itself from international law, ..."
Yes, and they should be called on it, relentlessly. Law is not law, only tyranny, if one can exempt oneself from it.
When a Spanish court took on Pinochet and by extension his US partners, this scared the shit out of powerful people here in the US, much more than has been let on. File charges against the bastards; demand their appearance; when they refuse to show up, try them in absentia; if found guilty, arrest them should they ever touch foot in that jurisdiction or wherever there is recognized procedures for extradition. Keep doing it again and again and again. Eventually it will have an effect, although it may seem hopeless now.
Imran Nazir 10 Jul 2015 18:23Adam Curtis: Bitter Lake. . Puts things into perspective.
Longasyourarm KDHymes 10 Jul 2015 18:21
Regrettably true. The problem began with the notion that putting pharma into bed with academics would generate miracles, a delusion shared by many neocon governments.
confettifoot Longasyourarm 10 Jul 2015 18:19
No - I read the link. "Learned helplessness" is a thing that's been around since Pavlov, and is helpful in compassionately understanding depression. It wasn't developed for the military, and you've taken Seligman's comments wildly out of context. I HATE these bastards, want them out of the profession - Seligman is very much a pacifist, well-known good guy, actually well out of the medicalized model, against coercion, opponent to bad stuff in the profession and that's why I was shocked.
If you have real source that he was hushing up whistleblowers show me and I'll loathe him, but it would be extraordinarily out of character. Be careful with people's reputations.
frazzerr 10 Jul 2015 18:18This is great don't get me wrong, they deserve to be jailed and for a considerably long time, but who oversaw all of the torture and sometimes the torture of innocent people?
He is also responsible for the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan as a direct reaction to the 9/11 bombing when neither Iraq or Afghanistan had any connections with Al-Qaeda.
I'll never forget his comment, "'I am driven with a mission from God'. God would tell me, 'George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan'. And I did. And then God would tell me 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq'. And I did."
When is George W. Bush going to tried for his war crimes?
redpill 10 Jul 2015 18:02US torture doctors could face charges after report alleges post-9/11 'collusion'
Good. Let them try using the Nuremberg defence!
MiniMo 10 Jul 2015 18:01"an independent review revealed that medical professionals lied and covered up their extensive involvement in post-9/11 torture. The revelation, puncturing years of denials, creates the potential for leadership firings, loss of licenses and even prosecutions."
The very sad part of this is that they were involved in even a slightest way in torture, not that they might lose their jobs or prosecuted.They fully deserve to lose their jobs at the very least.
They are expected to be caring professionals. Obviously not always so, and they've let down most of their colleagues so very badly, as the majority of them really do care.
KDHymes Pete Street 10 Jul 2015 18:01Your last paragraph pretty much reveals your true point of view. Know any women in the military? Bet they'd appreciate your words so much.
You know what? We could argue all day about whether any of this was justified, and as others have pointed out, your argument is irrelevant because all of it is illegal under both US and international law. But let's stick with something you might understand: it does not work. Period. Coerced confessions lead to bad decisions by those who use the information. How's things going for the US and Europe in the Middle East? Did any of these crimes make a single thing better?
Please enlighten us as to what difference torture made for us. And you'll have to do better than citing the same discredited cases over and over again. EVERY TIME the government has claimed to receive useful intel from torture, it has been disproved by those actually in the know. If they have evidence that is valid, they would surely be presenting it. But no, they don't have that, because there isn't any, so the only things they can do is lie and hope the first media report out-shouts the correction.
These people are very very stupid. NGIC is right up the road from me. They continue to have amazing smug confidence about their work. And yet their work has consistently been poor and misleading. Same goes for Homeland Security, the CIA, and the NSA. Every time we actually get a look at the details, it's obvious they don't know what they are doing at all, they're just spending their budgets, and sometimes indulging their sadism and racist paranoia.
But this has been the case all along with bloated intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Look at the FBI in the 60s and 70s. It's criminal, but it's also frankly laughable. There's a culture that builds up of certainty and self-reinforced ideology, and it becomes incapable of thought. It's worse now, because so much of the intelligence gathering is done from a desk. They know very little, but pretend they know so much. All that tech and all that spying can't make you smart. And we're all paying the very high price in dollars and military lives for their willful ignorance.
confettifoot marydole 10 Jul 2015 17:55
That's correct. And we all become good Nazis insofar as we tolerate it - but the average citizen has very little power against uber-powerful institutions like those that perform these abominations with our tax dollars. It's an outrage not only against the direct victims, but against every decent American and the conscience of this country.
IGiveTheWatchToYou 10 Jul 2015 17:52
"Sections of a previously classified CIA document, made public by the Guardian, empower the agency's director to "approve, modify, or disapprove all proposals pertaining to human subject research". The leeway provides the director, who has never in the agency's history been a medical doctor, with significant influence over limitations the US government sets to preserve safe, humane and ethical procedures on people."
I assume there's a tranche of records waiting to be discovered from US black sites around the world detailing various unspeakable illegal human experimentation projects with subjects rendered, I mean kidnapped from a war zone, by the military.
KDHymes Longasyourarm 10 Jul 2015 17:49Here's an alum who heartily agrees with you. I've watched this pseudo-science play havoc with family members, generating income and label after label, while ignoring crimes. I worked as a residential social worker in Ohio for 7 years, with people who were placed in group homes and apartments after the Athens Mental Health Center was closed. Several were simply slightly eccentric people whose families had committed them for the sin of inconvenience, or in one case for daring to stand up to sexual abuse. The "care" was a scandalous mixture of polypharmacology and hideous punishments. Yeah, it was a while ago, but these folks are still alive, and the "doctors" who signed off on all of it have never been held accountable, never even been forced to apologize to them. And these days what we seem to have in the US is, like everything else, multi-tiered according to class and ethnicity and income. Being weird while poor is a shooting offense. Being an abusive sociopath while rich gets you a label and a suspended sentence, with the help of well paid "expert witnesses."
There is no integrity, no real science, behind any of it. Partly this results from the ongoing fantasy that human behavior can be reduced to chemicals and imaging. But a lot of it has to do with the profit motive and attendant careerism, with the pharmaceutical industry and the psychotherapeutic industries smiling hand in hand on the way to the bank.
aardivark 10 Jul 2015 17:49Stephen Behnke, has a Yale law degree and a psychology Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. How ominous does that sound?
Mike Casey 10 Jul 2015 17:48
As these build, more and more people will be implicated. The APA, being a private organization can be held accountable more easily than can government officials. Hopefully this will lead to prosecution of decision makers within the government. We the people need to make our leaders accountable!
Jeffrey_Harrison usernameshinobi2 10 Jul 2015 17:35
You make me sick to my stomach. Just a few bad apples? Right. Torture is illegal under US law and our treaty obligations. For the military to conduct it, everybody from the CinC down to the individual torturer knew that. That's not a few nor were they rogue individuals acting on their own as you imply. This was systematic abuse of human beings deliberately conducted by the United States Government aided and abetted by Psychologists. They are scum and should be a total embarrassment to their profession although transparently the "profession" doesn't see it that way.
Contrary to your assertions, torture was not practiced nor condoned by the US military in the past and individual service members who tortured, even in the heat of battle, were punished. We also convicted foreigners who perpetrated the things that these psychologists did of war crimes after WWII. But never fear! I'm sure Egypt or Libya has an open slot for you in their system.
Longasyourarm 10 Jul 2015 17:35http://www.thedp.com/article/2014/12/penn-study-influence-on-cia-torture-techniques
The leading scumbag in the above story is illustrated in the link. He was instrumental in hiding and excusing the links between the corrupt APA and the CIA These greedy psychologist parasites are not physicians, everyone should realize, even though they make No attempt to clear the confusion that they are medical doctors.
The abject debasement of their own professional standards owes much to this Martin Seligman who was president of the APA and tried to squelch the whistleblowers.
He should be jailed and tortured by those who have suffered from the application of his crackpot theories, which he developed by giving electric shocks to dogs. The poor excuse for a university department that is psychology at Penn should be closed.
TaiChiMinh Pete Street 10 Jul 2015 17:35
Sorry for posting this twice, it was meant as a response to the apologist for US crimes, Pete Street:
>> The context of this historical period justifies torture not involving death or permanent physical injury, in order to protect national security at home and abroad. This context we call wartime.
Actually, the UN treaty (signed by the US in 1988 and ratified by the US in 1994) - Convention against Torture and Other Inhuman and Degrading Acts - specifically rejects the case you are trying to make, which makes you an apologist for crimes:
"2. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political stability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification for torture."
Nor does US law make an exception for wartime: "18 U.S. Code § 2340A - Torture
(a) Offense.- Whoever outside the United States commits or attempts to commit torture shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both, and if death results to any person from conduct prohibited by this subsection, shall be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life. . . .
(c) Conspiracy.- A person who conspires to commit an offense under this section shall be subject to the same penalties (other than the penalty of death) as the penalties prescribed for the offense, the commission of which was the object of the conspiracy."
Throw the book at them - and the people up to W who designed this criminal enterprise.
Maybe you can come up with an rectal destruction exception? Keep, er, probing . . .
Gegenbeispiel 10 Jul 2015 17:35Is there way for the International Criminal Court in the Hague to issue arrest warrants against these people? The US would not, of course, recognise them but it would keep them out of international professional conferences and make them afraid to ever travel outside the US.
DerekCurrie richy1 10 Jul 2015 16:43richy: I warned you that 'the masses' aren't prepared to face the treasonous nightmare. Don't feel bad.
Meanwhile, the proven evidence of the enablement of 9/11 by the Bush League continues to collect. Hiding from it and hating on it won't change the facts. No looniness or anti-Semite bad attitude is required to read what really went on that day and thereafter. No clap trap. No Holocaust denial. No anything denial. Just the facts. Sorry about that.
drew4439 10 Jul 2015 16:41Witch hunt.. Where are Cheyney, Rumsfeld and Pearl in all this..
MiltonWiltmellow 10 Jul 2015 16:25In 2004, after the Abu Ghraib torture scandal burst into public view, the emails detailed a private meeting of APA officials with CIA and military psychologists to "provide input on how the APA should deal with the growing furor", Risen wrote.
The word "collusion" comes to mind.
Perhaps "criminal conspiracy."
Kudos to those APA members/agitators who forced a reckoning.
As long as the CIA (DoJ) isn't setting up Behnke et al as scapegoats to distract from the institutional criminality of the Bush administration, this is a great report. One doesn't need the ethics of the APA to read and understand the Constitutional prohibition against "cruel and unusual punishment."
Finally a reckoning appears on the horizon.
I hope it isn't a mirage.
These people attacked and harmed America as surely as the terrorists. Their self-proclaimed virtue and patriotism aren't relevant. (For instance, by their actions, they allow members of ISIS to argue their atrocities are reprisals.)
Let's see the DoJ and FBI perform their actual duties rather than interdicting terror plots which they imagine, instigate, finance and then -- with much publicity -- discover and prevent.
DerekCurrie 10 Jul 2015 16:17
This minor revelation about 9/11 is nothing compared to the Bush League's involvement in enabling that day and lying their way into the Iraq War, as per the plans of both the Israeli government and their pawn in the USA: PNAC, Project for the New American Century, run by the Neo-Con-Jobs. So much of this is out for anyone to read and prove to themselves at least a critical part of what really happened that day and thereafter. But the masses still aren't prepared to face that treasonous nightmare.
But if you want to get started!
Here's where scientists and engineers are collecting proven data about the actual 9/11 events. You won't enjoy it:kgb999again 10 Jul 2015 16:17
I'm almost positive Mitchell and Jessen were members of the APA when they were designing and selling torture campaigns a decade ago. IIRC, at the time they were vocally supported by the then-president who also had ties to some of the companies that were monetizing interrogation techniques.
No longer being members seems irrelevant to the actions the APA has taken over the years defending the behavior of these two specifically - and the consistent APA defenses of these practices in general.
John Smith 10 Jul 2015 16:14
OK, this mind come across as a bit cold, but human rights aside, what most amazes me about this whole sad affair is that the APA didn't brief the US government about what value of intel can be gained from torture.
Torture has been found to be excellent in extracting confessions: the subject, once deprived of all hope and having to rely on their torturer for all emotional support and empathy, will confess to anything. Even shooting Kennedy.
As a means of securing reliable, actual info, it's worse than useless. Subjects will give answers to please their captors, and avoid pain.
This is widely known. If the APA didn't pass this advice on, they are actually complicit in undermining the safety and effectiveness of the US intelligence gathering organisations.The APA would appear to have been caught up in both a blood lust for terrorists, and root and branch stupidity. What a mess.
sampson01 10 Jul 2015 16:13
The APA chose to be a rubber stamp for the govt, and allow for its members to be there to reaserch what the boundries were separating 'enhanced interrogation' and torture. Thus using human subjects being exposed to enhanced interrogation in an experiment to assess if it was in fact torture. One of the architects of this program (though hadn't renewed his APA membership) has admitted (proudly on Fox News) that he personally water boarded a prisoner during an interagation session.
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Jul 03, 2015 | OffGuardian
The recent 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was a reminder of the great crime of fascism, whose Nazi iconography is embedded in our consciousness. Fascism is preserved as history, as flickering footage of goose-stepping blackshirts, their criminality terrible and clear. Yet in the same liberal societies, whose war-making elites urge us never to forget, the accelerating danger of a modern kind of fascism is suppressed; for it is their fascism.
To initiate a war of aggression…," said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in 1946, "is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
Had the Nazis not invaded Europe, Auschwitz and the Holocaust would not have happened. Had the United States and its satellites not initiated their war of aggression in Iraq in 2003, almost a million people would be alive today; and Islamic State, or ISIS, would not have us in thrall to its savagery. They are the progeny of modern fascism, weaned by the bombs, bloodbaths and lies that are the surreal theatre known as news.
Libya
Like the fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, big lies are delivered with the precision of a metronome: thanks to an omnipresent, repetitive media and its virulent censorship by omission. Take the catastrophe in Libya.
In 2011, Nato launched 9,700 "strike sorties" against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that "most [of the children killed] were under the age of ten".
The public sodomising of the Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi with a "rebel" bayonet was greeted by the then US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, with the words: "We came, we saw, he died." His murder, like the destruction of his country, was justified with a familiar big lie; he was planning "genocide" against his own people. "We knew… that if we waited one more day," said President Obama, "Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world."
This was the fabrication of Islamist militias facing defeat by Libyan government forces. They told Reuters there would be "a real bloodbath, a massacre like we saw in Rwanda". Reported on March 14, 2011, the lie provided the first spark for Nato's inferno, described by David Cameron as a "humanitarian intervention".
Secretly supplied and trained by Britain's SAS, many of the "rebels" would become ISIS, whose latest video offering shows the beheading of 21 Coptic Christian workers seized in Sirte, the city destroyed on their behalf by Nato bombers.
For Obama, David Cameron and then French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Gaddafi's true crime was Libya's economic independence and his declared intention to stop selling Africa's greatest oil reserves in US dollars. The petrodollar is a pillar of American imperial power. Gaddafi audaciously planned to underwrite a common African currency backed by gold, establish an all-Africa bank and promote economic union among poor countries with prized resources. Whether or not this would happen, the very notion was intolerable to the US as it prepared to "enter" Africa and bribe African governments with military "partnerships".
Following Nato's attack under cover of a Security Council resolution, Obama, wrote Garikai Chengu…
confiscated $30 billion from Libya's Central Bank, which Gaddafi had earmarked for the establishment of an African Central Bank and the African gold backed dinar currency".
The Balkans
The "humanitarian war" against Libya drew on a model close to western liberal hearts, especially in the media. In 1999, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair sent Nato to bomb Serbia, because, they lied, the Serbs were committing "genocide" against ethnic Albanians in the secessionist province of Kosovo. David Scheffer, US ambassador-at-large for war crimes [sic], claimed that as many as "225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59″ might have been murdered. Both Clinton and Blair evoked the Holocaust and "the spirit of the Second World War". The West's heroic allies were the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose criminal record was set aside. The British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, told them to call him any time on his mobile phone.
With the Nato bombing over, and much of Serbia's infrastructure in ruins, along with schools, hospitals, monasteries and the national TV station, international forensic teams descended upon Kosovo to exhume evidence of the "holocaust". The FBI failed to find a single mass grave and went home. The Spanish forensic team did the same, its leader angrily denouncing "a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines". A year later, a United Nations tribunal on Yugoslavia announced the final count of the dead in Kosovo: 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the KLA.
There was no genocide. The "holocaust" was a lie. The Nato attack had been fraudulent.
Behind the lie, there was serious purpose. Yugoslavia was a uniquely independent, multi-ethnic federation that had stood as a political and economic bridge in the Cold War. Most of its utilities and major manufacturing was publicly owned. This was not acceptable to the expanding European Community, especially newly united Germany, which had begun a drive east to capture its "natural market" in the Yugoslav provinces of Croatia and Slovenia. By the time the Europeans met at Maastricht in 1991 to lay their plans for the disastrous eurozone, a secret deal had been struck; Germany would recognise Croatia. Yugoslavia was doomed.
In Washington, the US saw that the struggling Yugoslav economy was denied World Bank loans. Nato, then an almost defunct Cold War relic, was reinvented as imperial enforcer. At a 1999 Kosovo "peace" conference in Rambouillet, in France, the Serbs were subjected to the enforcer's duplicitous tactics. The Rambouillet accord included a secret Annex B, which the US delegation inserted on the last day. This demanded the military occupation of the whole of Yugoslavia – a country with bitter memories of the Nazi occupation – and the implementation of a "free-market economy" and the privatisation of all government assets. No sovereign state could sign this. Punishment followed swiftly; Nato bombs fell on a defenceless country. It was the precursor to the catastrophes in Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria and Libya, and Ukraine.
Since 1945, more than a third of the membership of the United Nations – 69 countries – have suffered some or all of the following at the hands of America's modern fascism. They have been invaded, their governments overthrown, their popular movements suppressed, their elections subverted, their people bombed and their economies stripped of all protection, their societies subjected to a crippling siege known as "sanctions". The British historian Mark Curtis estimates the death toll in the millions. In every case, a big lie was deployed.
Afghanistan
Tonight, for the first time since 9/11, our combat mission in Afghanistan is over."
These were opening words of Obama's 2015 State of the Union address. In fact, some 10,000 troops and 20,000 military contractors (mercenaries) remain in Afghanistan on indefinite assignment. "The longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion," said Obama. In fact, more civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2014 than in any year since the UN took records.
The majority have been killed – civilians and soldiers – during Obama's time as president.
The tragedy of Afghanistan rivals the epic crime in Indochina. In his lauded and much quoted book 'The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives', Zbigniew Brzezinski, the godfather of US policies from Afghanistan to the present day, writes that if America is to control Eurasia and dominate the world, it cannot sustain a popular democracy, because "the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion… Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilisation." He is right. As WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden have revealed, a surveillance and police state is usurping democracy. In 1976, Brzezinski, then President Carter's National Security Advisor, demonstrated his point by dealing a death blow to Afghanistan's first and only democracy. Who knows this vital history?
In the 1960s, a popular revolution swept Afghanistan, the poorest country on earth, eventually overthrowing the vestiges of the aristocratic regime in 1978. The People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) formed a government and declared a reform programme that included the abolition of feudalism, freedom for all religions, equal rights for women and social justice for the ethnic minorities. More than 13,000 political prisoners were freed and police files publicly burned.
The new government introduced free medical care for the poorest; peonage was abolished, a mass literacy programme was launched. For women, the gains were unheard of. By the late 1980s, half the university students were women, and women made up almost half of Afghanistan's doctors, a third of civil servants and the majority of teachers. "Every girl," recalled Saira Noorani, a female surgeon, "could go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked. We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian film on a Friday and listen to the latest music. It all started to go wrong when the mujaheddin started winning. They used to kill teachers and burn schools. We were terrified. It was funny and sad to think these were the people the West supported."
The PDPA government was backed by the Soviet Union, even though, as former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance later admitted, "there was no evidence of any Soviet complicity [in the revolution]". Alarmed by the growing confidence of liberation movements throughout the world, Brzezinski decided that if Afghanistan was to succeed under the PDPA, its independence and progress would offer the "threat of a promising example".
On July 3, 1979, the White House secretly authorised support for tribal "fundamentalist" groups known as the mujaheddin, a program that grew to over $500 million a year in U.S. arms and other assistance. The aim was the overthrow of Afghanistan's first secular, reformist government. In August 1979, the US embassy in Kabul reported that "the United States' larger interests… would be served by the demise of [the PDPA government], despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan." The italics are mine.
The mujaheddin were the forebears of al-Qaeda and Islamic State. They included Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who received tens of millions of dollars in cash from the CIA Hekmatyar's specialty was trafficking in opium and throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. Invited to London, he was lauded by Prime Minister Thatcher as a "freedom fighter".
Such fanatics might have remained in their tribal world had Brzezinski not launched an international movement to promote Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and so undermine secular political liberation and "destabilise" the Soviet Union, creating, as he wrote in his autobiography, "a few stirred up Muslims". His grand plan coincided with the ambitions of the Pakistani dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, to dominate the region. In 1986, the CIA and Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI, began to recruit people from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. The Saudi multi-millionaire Osama bin Laden was one of them. Operatives who would eventually join the Taliban and al-Qaeda, were recruited at an Islamic college in Brooklyn, New York, and given paramilitary training at a CIA camp in Virginia. This was called "Operation Cyclone". Its success was celebrated in 1996 when the last PDPA president of Afghanistan, Mohammed Najibullah – who had gone before the UN General Assembly to plead for help – was hanged from a streetlight by the Taliban.
The "blowback" of Operation Cyclone and its "few stirred up Muslims" was September 11, 2001. Operation Cyclone became the "war on terror", in which countless men, women and children would lose their lives across the Muslim world, from Afghanistan to Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Syria. The enforcer's message was and remains: "You are with us or against us."
The common thread is mass murder
The common thread in fascism, past and present, is mass murder. The American invasion of Vietnam had its "free fire zones", "body counts" and "collateral damage". In the province of Quang Ngai, where I reported from, many thousands of civilians ("gooks") were murdered by the US; yet only one massacre, at My Lai, is remembered. In Laos and Cambodia, the greatest aerial bombardment in history produced an epoch of terror marked today by the spectacle of joined-up bomb craters which, from the air, resemble monstrous necklaces. The bombing gave Cambodia its own ISIS, led by Pol Pot.
Today, the world's greatest single campaign of terror entails the execution of entire families, guests at weddings, mourners at funerals. These are Obama's victims. According to the New York Times, Obama makes his selection from a CIA "kill list" presented to him every Tuesday in the White House Situation Room. He then decides, without a shred of legal justification, who will live and who will die. His execution weapon is the Hellfire missile carried by a pilotless aircraft known as a drone; these roast their victims and festoon the area with their remains. Each "hit" is registered on a faraway console screen as a "bugsplat".
"For goose-steppers," wrote the historian Norman Pollack, "substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarisation of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manque, blithely at work, planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while."
Uniting fascism old and new is the cult of superiority. "I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being," said Obama, evoking declarations of national fetishism from the 1930s. As the historian Alfred W. McCoy has pointed out, it was the Hitler devotee, Carl Schmitt, who said, "The sovereign is he who decides the exception." This sums up Americanism, the world's dominant ideology. That it remains unrecognised as a predatory ideology is the achievement of an equally unrecognised brainwashing. Insidious, undeclared, presented wittily as enlightenment on the march, its conceit insinuates western culture. I grew up on a cinematic diet of American glory, almost all of it a distortion. I had no idea that it was the Red Army that had destroyed most of the Nazi war machine, at a cost of as many as 13 million soldiers. By contrast, US losses, including in the Pacific, were 400,000. Hollywood reversed this.
The difference now is that cinema audiences are invited to wring their hands at the "tragedy" of American psychopaths having to kill people in distant places – just as the President himself kills them. The embodiment of Hollywood's violence, the actor and director Clint Eastwood, was nominated for an Oscar this year for his movie, 'American Sniper', which is about a licensed murderer and nutcase. The New York Times described it as a "patriotic, pro-family picture which broke all attendance records in its opening days".
There are no heroic movies about America's embrace of fascism. During the Second World War, America (and Britain) went to war against Greeks who had fought heroically against Nazism and were resisting the rise of Greek fascism. In 1967, the CIA helped bring to power a fascist military junta in Athens – as it did in Brazil and most of Latin America. Germans and east Europeans who had colluded with Nazi aggression and crimes against humanity were given safe haven in the US; many were pampered and their talents rewarded. Wernher von Braun was the "father" of both the Nazi V-2 terror bomb and the US space programme.
Ukraine
In the 1990s, as former Soviet republics, eastern Europe and the Balkans became military outposts of Nato, the heirs to a Nazi movement in Ukraine were given their opportunity. Responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews, Poles and Russians during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Ukrainian fascism was rehabilitated and its "new wave" hailed by the enforcer as "nationalists".
This reached its apogee in 2014 when the Obama administration splashed out $5 billion on a coup against the elected government. The shock troops were neo-Nazis known as the Right Sector and Svoboda. Their leaders include Oleh Tyahnybok, who has called for a purge of the "Moscow-Jewish mafia" and "other scum", including gays, feminists and those on the political left.
These fascists are now integrated into the Kiev coup government. The first deputy speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Andriy Parubiy, a leader of the governing party, is co-founder of Svoboda. On February 14, Parubiy announced he was flying to Washington get "the USA to give us highly precise modern weaponry". If he succeeds, it will be seen as an act of war by Russia.
No western leader has spoken up about the revival of fascism in the heart of Europe – with the exception of Vladimir Putin, whose people lost 22 million to a Nazi invasion that came through the borderland of Ukraine. At the recent Munich Security Conference, Obama's Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, ranted abuse about European leaders for opposing the US arming of the Kiev regime. She referred to the German Defence Minister as "the minister for defeatism". It was Nuland who masterminded the coup in Kiev. The wife of Robert D. Kagan, a leading "neo-con" luminary and co-founder of the extreme right wing Project for a New American Century, she was foreign policy advisor to Dick Cheney.
Nuland's coup did not go to plan. Nato was prevented from seizing Russia's historic, legitimate, warm-water naval base in Crimea. The mostly Russian population of Crimea – illegally annexed to Ukraine by Nikita Krushchev in 1954 – voted overwhelmingly to return to Russia, as they had done in the 1990s. The referendum was voluntary, popular and internationally observed. There was no invasion.
At the same time, the Kiev regime turned on the ethnic Russian population in the east with the ferocity of ethnic cleansing. Deploying neo-Nazi militias in the manner of the Waffen-SS, they bombed and laid to siege cities and towns. They used mass starvation as a weapon, cutting off electricity, freezing bank accounts, stopping social security and pensions. More than a million refugees fled across the border into Russia. In the western media, they became unpeople escaping "the violence" caused by the "Russian invasion". The Nato commander, General Breedlove – whose name and actions might have been inspired by Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove – announced that 40,000 Russian troops were "massing". In the age of forensic satellite evidence, he offered none.
These Russian-speaking and bilingual people of Ukraine – a third of the population – have long sought a federation that reflects the country's ethnic diversity and is both autonomous and independent of Moscow. Most are not "separatists" but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland and oppose the power grab in Kiev. Their revolt and establishment of autonomous "states" are a reaction to Kiev's attacks on them. Little of this has been explained to western audiences.
On May 2, 2014, in Odessa, 41 ethnic Russians were burned alive in the trade union headquarters with police standing by. The Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh hailed the massacre as "another bright day in our national history". In the American and British media, this was reported as a "murky tragedy" resulting from "clashes" between "nationalists" (neo-Nazis) and "separatists" (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine).
The New York Times buried the story, having dismissed as Russian propaganda warnings about the fascist and anti-Semitic policies of Washington's new clients. The Wall Street Journal damned the victims – "Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says". Obama congratulated the junta for its "restraint".
If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained "pariah" role in the West will justify the lie that Russia is invading Ukraine. On January 29, Ukraine's top military commander, General Viktor Muzhemko, almost inadvertently dismissed the very basis for US and EU sanctions on Russia when he told a news conference emphatically: "The Ukrainian army is not fighting with the regular units of the Russian Army". There were "individual citizens" who were members of "illegal armed groups", but there was no Russian invasion. This was not news. Vadym Prystaiko, Kiev's Deputy Foreign Minister, has called for "full scale war" with nuclear-armed Russia.
On February 21, US Senator James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, introduced a bill that would authorise American arms for the Kiev regime. In his Senate presentation, Inhofe used photographs he claimed were of Russian troops crossing into Ukraine, which have long been exposed as fakes. It was reminiscent of Ronald Reagan's fake pictures of a Soviet installation in Nicaragua, and Colin Powell's fake evidence to the UN of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The intensity of the smear campaign against Russia and the portrayal of its president as a pantomime villain is unlike anything I have known as a reporter. Robert Parry, one of America's most distinguished investigative journalists, who revealed the Iran-Contra scandal, wrote recently, "No European government, since Adolf Hitler's Germany, has seen fit to dispatch Nazi storm troopers to wage war on a domestic population, but the Kiev regime has and has done so knowingly. Yet across the West's media/political spectrum, there has been a studious effort to cover up this reality even to the point of ignoring facts that have been well established… If you wonder how the world could stumble into world war three – much as it did into world war one a century ago – all you need to do is look at the madness over Ukraine that has proved impervious to facts or reason."
In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media: "The use made by Nazi conspirators of psychological warfare is well known. Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack… In the propaganda system of the Hitler State it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons." In the Guardian on February 2, Timothy Garton-Ash called, in effect, for a world war. "Putin must be stopped," said the headline. "And sometimes only guns can stop guns." He conceded that the threat of war might "nourish a Russian paranoia of encirclement"; but that was fine. He name-checked the military equipment needed for the job and advised his readers that "America has the best kit".
In 2003, Garton-Ash, an Oxford professor, repeated the propaganda that led to the slaughter in Iraq. Saddam Hussein, he wrote, "has, as [Colin] Powell documented, stockpiled large quantities of horrifying chemical and biological weapons, and is hiding what remains of them. He is still trying to get nuclear ones." He lauded Blair as a "Gladstonian, Christian liberal interventionist". In 2006, he wrote, "Now we face the next big test of the West after Iraq: Iran."
The outbursts – or as Garton-Ash prefers, his "tortured liberal ambivalence" – are not untypical of those in the transatlantic liberal elite who have struck a Faustian deal. The war criminal Blair is their lost leader. The Guardian, in which Garton-Ash's piece appeared, published a full-page advertisement for an American Stealth bomber. On a menacing image of the Lockheed Martin monster were the words: "The F-35. GREAT For Britain". This American "kit" will cost British taxpayers £1.3 billion, its F-model predecessors having slaughtered across the world. In tune with its advertiser, a Guardian editorial has demanded an increase in military spending.
Once again, there is serious purpose. The rulers of the world want Ukraine not only as a missile base; they want its economy. Kiev's new Finance Minister, Nataliwe Jaresko, is a former senior US State Department official in charge of US overseas "investment". She was hurriedly given Ukrainian citizenship. They want Ukraine for its abundant gas; Vice President Joe Biden's son is on the board of Ukraine's biggest oil, gas and fracking company. The manufacturers of GM seeds, companies such as the infamous Monsanto, want Ukraine's rich farming soil.
Above all, they want Ukraine's mighty neighbour, Russia. They want to Balkanise or dismember Russia and exploit the greatest source of natural gas on earth. As the Arctic ice melts, they want control of the Arctic Ocean and its energy riches, and Russia's long Arctic land border. Their man in Moscow used to be Boris Yeltsin, a drunk, who handed his country's economy to the West. His successor, Putin, has re-established Russia as a sovereign nation; that is his crime.
The responsibility of the rest of us is clear. It is to identify and expose the reckless lies of warmongers and never to collude with them. It is to re-awaken the great popular movements that brought a fragile civilisation to modern imperial states. Most important, it is to prevent the conquest of ourselves: our minds, our humanity, our self respect. If we remain silent, victory over us is assured, and a holocaust beckons.
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Jun 17, 2015 | The Guardian
Torture architects are television pundits and given enormous book contracts while Guantanamo detainees still can't discuss what happened to themGUANTANAMO
Prisoners haven't been allowed to talk about what happened to them here. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Wednesday 17 June 2015 07.15 EDT Last modified on Wednesday 17 June 2015 13.35 EDTTorture is and has been illegal in the US, so no new law is needed. Prosecute to the full extent anyone who authorized, implemented or has or is covering up these grave crimes. Starting at the Very Top on down. Now.
CraigSummers, 17 Jun 2015 16:16)
capatriot -> CraigSummers 17 Jun 2015 16:12The evidence that torture doesn't work is overwhelming. http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/09/senate-committee-cia-torture-does-not-work http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/08/world/does-torture-work-the-cias-claims-and-what-the-committee-found.html?_r=0 http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/09/cia-torture-report-released http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11283082/Does-the-use-of-torture-ever-work.html http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/09/dick-cheney-defends-torture-al-qaida The president's oath is to obey the law, the constitution, not to "keep Americans safe." Torture is illegal for good and proper reasons. It cannot be used and, if used, must be prosecuted and punished.
It is immaterial if it "works" ... this is not Dirty Harry or Jack Bauer; this is real governance: a govt of laws, not men.
bloggod 17 Jun 2015 16:07
"The only reason a host of current and former CIA officials aren't already in jail is because of cowardice on the Obama administration," says Timm
________An emphatic collusion of many more complicit parties would seem to suggest the world is not run by Obama...
ID8667623 17 Jun 2015 15:30
Obama appears to see as his primary goal greasing the skids of American decline. Washington has lost all credibility as presiding over a democracy governed by the rule of law, what with this two-tiered justice system. Celebrate the betrayers of the constitution and punish those who blow the whistle on them.
While it's five years old, Alfred McCoy's article on the US decline was cited twice last week, reminding me of how hard-hitting McCoy's argument is. It can be found at TomDispatch:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175327/tomgram%3A_alfred_mccoy%2C_taking_down_america
gbob5366 -> outkast1213 17 Jun 2015 14:54
I, being a US citizen, feel that it is up to us to stand up to US imperialism.
Until we, in the US, stand up and say "Enough", this country will continue it's attack upon the world.Wake up America --
PS. You see that the war has come home... just look at the military armament being used by the police. And, we need to stand up all together! Please, Mr. Policeman, don't shoot us. Protect us against the 1%.
JimHorn 17 Jun 2015 11:20
In the run up to the Iranian Revolution, I worked with an Iranian woman in a restaurant. She wore the same short sleeve blouse as the others, and her skirt was only an inch or two longer. Her husband was a grad student at the university. Obviously thoroughly westernized. I took the opportunity to ask an actual Iranian about the events that were happening in her homeland.
She told me that her brother, a student, had been picked up and tortured by Savak, the Shah's secret police. She said
"No one in my family, my father, my brothers, my uncles, my cousins, - will support the Shah. We hate Khomeini, but we also hate the Shah. We will let Khomeini overthrow the Shah and then we will overthrow Khomeini."
These were people who should have been on the side of the westernizing Shah but sat on the sidelines. Some reports say that Savak may have treated up to 100,000 people like this woman's brother. Allowing for ten adult relatives per victim, we get a million westernized Iranians. The population at the time was about 30 million. The routine use of torture by Savak may well have contributed heavily to the failure of the Shah, particularly considering that these people were probably concentrated in the cities where most of the action took place.
Note that Savak, sadly, trained by our CIA, was intent on preventing a communist takeover and concentrated on those who wished to westernize government as well as the economy. They utterly failed to deal with the threat from religious conservatives.
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May 29, 2015 | The Guardian
Rand Paul indicated his intention on Friday to filibuster a surveillance reform bill that he considers insufficient, as privacy advocates felt momentum to tear the heart out of the Bush-era Patriot Act as its Snowden-era expiration date approaches.
With controversial provisions of the Patriot Act scheduled to run out at midnight on Sunday, Paul, the Kentucky senator and Republican presidential hopeful, fielded questions about how he intended to win privacy campaigners a long hoped-for victory.
... ... ...
"By collecting all of your records, we're wasting so much money, so much time, and the haystack's so large we can't find the terrorists," Paul said. "I'm for looking at all of the terrorists' records – I just want their name on the warrant and I just want it to be signed by a judge just like the constitution says."
... ... ...
"Right now we're having a little bit of a war in Washington," Paul said at the rally on Friday. "It's me versus some of the rest of them – or a lot of the rest of them."
... ... ...
In the middle is a bill that fell three votes shy of a 60-vote threshold. The USA Freedom Act, supported by Obama, junks the NSA's bulk collection of US phone records in exchange for extending the lifespan of the Patriot Act's controversial FBI powers.
While McConnell, Obama and many Freedom Act supporters describe those powers as crucial, a recent Justice Department report said the expiring "business records" provision has not led to "any major case developments". Another power set to expire, the "roving wiretap" provision, has been linked to abuse in declassified documents; and the third, the "lone wolf" provision, has never been used, the FBI confirmed to the Guardian.
... ... ...
The White House has long backed passage of the USA Freedom Act, calling it the only available mechanism to save the Patriot Act powers ahead of expiration now that the House has recessed until Monday.
Obama on Friday chastised what he said were "a handful of Senators" standing in the way of passing the USA Freedom Act, who he alleged risked creating an intelligence lapse.
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence whom Paul has criticized for lying to Congress about surveillance, issued a rare plea to pass a bill he has reluctantly embraced in order to retain Patriot Act powers.
"At this late date, prompt passage of the USA Freedom Act by the Senate is the best way to minimize any possible disruption of our ability to protect the American people," Clapper said on Friday.
At the Beacon Drive-in diner in Spartanburg, Paul chastised proponents of the Patriot Act for arguing the law would prevent another 9/11. "Bull!" a woman in the crowd exclaimed, as others groaned at the national security excuse cited by more hawkish lawmakers.
"I think a lot of people in America agree with me," Paul said, "that your phone records should not be collected by your government, unless they suspect you of a crime and unless they call a judge and unless a warrant has your name on it."
Multiple polls released this month have found overwhelming public antipathy for government surveillance.
Still, it remains unclear if the USA Freedom Act has the votes to pass. Senate rules permit Paul to effectively block debate on the bill until expiration. Few who are watching the debate closely felt on Friday that they knew how Sunday's dramatic session would resolve.
But privacy groups, sensing the prospect of losing one of their most reviled post-9/11 laws, were not in a mood to compromise on Friday.
"Better to let the Patriot Act sunset and reboot the conversation with a more fulsome debate," said Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.
See also:
Trenton Pierce -> phrixus 30 May 2015 21:18
He opposes indefinite detention in the NDAA, he opposes TPP and the fast track. He opposes the militarization of local police. He opposes the secrecy of the Federal Reserve. He opposes unwarranted civil asset forfeiture. He opposes no-knock home searches. He opposes the failed drug war. He opposes war without congressional approval. What is it about him you don't like?
Trenton Pierce -> masscraft 30 May 2015 21:14
Then line up behind Rand. He polls the best against Hilary. The era of big government Republican is over. Realize that or get ready for your Democrat rule.
Vintage59 -> Nedward Marbletoe 30 May 2015 16:20
The machine would chew him up and spit him out and he's smart enough to know that.
ripogenus 30 May 2015 07:47
Just listened to NPR's On the Media. They did a special podcast just on the patriot act and the consequences if it expires. Apparently the real problem is Executive Order 12333, under which almost all of the mass surveillance is "authorized".
seasonedsenior 29 May 2015 22:20
New technology is beginning to equal the playing field somewhat whether it be video of police misconduct or blocking out Congress from 10,000 websites to stop NSA spying. This part of technology is a real positive. There are too many secrets in our democracy-light that should be exposed for the greater good. There is too much concentrated power that needs to be opened up. I am happy to see these changes happening. Keep up the good work.
AmyInNH cswanson420 29 May 2015 22:12
By the time someone is a party candidate, they've already been bought off. National write-in.
Viet Nguyen -> cswanson420 29 May 2015 17:44
politicians listen to corporations and shareholders. What corporations dictate, their political lapdogs obediently listens.
Best examples? Retarded laws that discriminate against gay people in states like Indiana. When major corporations such as Wal-Mart and Apple, who only cares about money, condemn such retarded laws with potential boycotts, their political lackeys quickly follow in line.
I am waiting for another multinational corporation to declare the NSA process detrimental to businesses, and see how many former government supporters of the NSA do a complete 180 degree stance flip.
EdChamp -> elaine layabout 29 May 2015 17:22
Please, tell me that porn sites are involved in this. Cut off Congress's porn access and they will be putty in our hands.
Congratulations! You win the award of the day for that one gleaming guardian comment that truly made me smile.
Repent House 29 May 2015 16:13
"This is a blackout," read the site to which computers from congressional IP addresses were redirected. "We are blocking your access until you end mass surveillance laws."
This is so freekin awesome... mess with the bull you get the horns as I always say! They seem to under estimate the strength, knowledge, tenacity, of the "AMERICAN PEOPLE" This is what we need to do on a wider scale for a number of things wrong! Awesome!
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May 15, 2015 | Zero Hedge
Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
It's not just those domestic extremists and crazy "conspiracy theory" kooks who took serious issue with UK Prime Minister David Cameron's recent overtly fascist language when it comes to freedom of expression in Great Britain. For example, in a post published today, the UK Independent describes the quote below as "the creepiest thing David Cameron has ever said."
This statement, and others like it, are a huge deal. This isn't how the leader of a major civilized Western so-called "democracy" speaks to the citizenry. It is how a master talks to his slaves. How a ruler addresses his subjects. I think the following tweet by Glenn Greenwald earlier today sums up David Cameron's attitude perfectly well:
This is really the mentality of Her Majesty's Government
But now it is not enough to obey. You must LOVE BIG BROTHER.- Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 14, 2015
Those of us who are in disbelief over David Cameron's recent language, don't have to just point to the quote above. There's a lot more to it than a simple quote. For example, the Guardian reports:
The measures would give the police powers to apply to the high court for an order to limit the "harmful activities" of an extremist individual. The definition of harmful is to include a risk of public disorder, a risk of harassment, alarm or distress or creating a "threat to the functioning of democracy".
A "risk of public disorder," or a "risk of harassment alarm or distress." Think about that for a second. Pretty much 90% of all speech could be classified as posing a risk to all of those things. It's basically banning any criticism the government doesn't like. Truly remarkable. Now here's how the magnificent "democracy" of Great Britain plans on dealing with such "extremists."
They would include a ban on broadcasting and a requirement to submit to the police in advance any proposed publication on the web and social media or in print. The bill will also contain plans for banning orders for extremist organizations which seek to undermine democracy or use hate speech in public places, but it will fall short of banning on the grounds of provoking hatred.
Although I'm not a British citizen and have never lived in the UK, I have spent some time writing about the disturbing trends happening across the pond due to the historic, cultural, geopolitical and linguistic ties between the U.S. and Great Britain. I warned all about these dangerous trends last fall in the post, The UK's Conservative Party Declares War on YouTube, Twitter, Free Speech and Common Sense. Here are a few excerpts:
Teresa May wants to "ban non-violent extremist groups that fall short of the current threshold for being banned as terrorist-related organizations." Think about that very closely. Essentially, she is saying non-violent groups that are currently not breaking any laws should be criminalized by creating new laws. Once this process begins, it will continue to be expanded and expanded until pretty much every form of expression other than government propaganda will be banned.
Secondly, she notes that the new laws are necessary to combat groups that undertake activities "for the purpose of overthrowing democracy." Considering that the U.S. government changes the meanings of words at a moment's notice, such as claiming that "imminent" doesn't really mean "imminent," I argue that an official government definition of democracy is necessary. Moreover, what if the UK is like the U.S., a state that claims to be a democracy, but in reality is an oligarchy? What are the rules about calling for the removal of an oligarchy?
Have fun mates.
junction
Senator Charles Schumer would agree with Cameron, judging by the House bill he introduced after the Oklahoma City bombing.
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A blizzard of OKC-inspired "domestic terrorism" bills were rushed into Congress in a matter of days, some of them pre-written and already printed up BEFORE THE BOMBING.
These proposed laws cover everything from banning virtually all privately owned firearms to unlimited and court-admissible Federal wiretaps to censorship of the Internet to the suspension of habeas corpus in "terrorism" cases to the grotesque destruction of the First Amendment advocated in Charles Schumer's bill H.R. 2580, which imposes a five-year prison sentence for publicly engaging in "unseemly speculation" and publishing or transmitting by wire or electronic means "baseless conspiracy theories regarding the Federal government of the United States".
Who decides what is a "baseless conspiracy theory'? Why, the very same government, of course.
Latina Lover
The London Banksters must be really frightened to trot out their most senior government mouthpiece.
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Sep 29, 2009 | Technoccult
19 Comments
First thing first, Robert Paxton's definition of fascism:Fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline. [...]
A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
Now, Sara Robinson on the question "Are we there yet?":
And every time this question got asked, people like Chip Berlet and Dave Neiwert and Fred Clarkson and yours truly would look up from our maps like a parent on a long drive, and smile a wan smile of reassurance. "Wellll…we're on a bad road, and if we don't change course, we could end up there soon enough. But there's also still plenty of time and opportunity to turn back. Watch, but don't worry. As bad as this looks: no - we are not there yet."
In tracking the mileage on this trip to perdition, many of us relied on the work of historian Robert Paxton, who is probably the world's pre-eminent scholar on the subject of how countries turn fascist. In a 1998 paper published in The Journal of Modern History, Paxton argued that the best way to recognize emerging fascist movements isn't by their rhetoric, their politics, or their aesthetics. Rather, he said, mature democracies turn fascist by a recognizable process, a set of five stages that may be the most important family resemblance that links all the whole motley collection of 20th Century fascisms together. According to our reading of Paxton's stages, we weren't there yet. There were certain signs - one in particular - we were keeping an eye out for, and we just weren't seeing it.
And now we are. In fact, if you know what you're looking for, it's suddenly everywhere. [...]
All through the Bush years, progressive right-wing watchers refused to call it "fascism" because, though we kept looking, we never saw clear signs of a deliberate, committed institutional partnership forming between America's conservative elites and its emerging homegrown brownshirt horde. We caught tantalizing signs of brief flirtations - passing political alliances, money passing hands, far-right moonbat talking points flying out of the mouths of "mainstream" conservative leaders. But it was all circumstantial, and fairly transitory. The two sides kept a discreet distance from each other, at least in public. What went on behind closed doors, we could only guess. They certainly didn't act like a married couple.
Now, the guessing game is over. We know beyond doubt that the Teabag movement was created out of whole cloth by astroturf groups like Dick Armey's FreedomWorks and Tim Phillips' Americans for Prosperity, with massive media help from FOX News. We see the Birther fracas - the kind of urban myth-making that should have never made it out of the pages of the National Enquirer - being openly ratified by Congressional Republicans. We've seen Armey's own professionally-produced field manual that carefully instructs conservative goon squads in the fine art of disrupting the democratic governing process - and the film of public officials being terrorized and threatened to the point where some of them required armed escorts to leave the building. We've seen Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner applauding and promoting a video of the disruptions and looking forward to "a long, hot August for Democrats in Congress."
This is the sign we were waiting for - the one that tells us that yes, kids: we are there now. America's conservative elites have openly thrown in with the country's legions of discontented far right thugs. They have explicitly deputized them and empowered them to act as their enforcement arm on America's streets, sanctioning the physical harassment and intimidation of workers, liberals, and public officials who won't do their political or economic bidding.
This is the catalyzing moment at which honest-to-Hitler fascism begins. It's also our very last chance to stop it.
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May 27, 2014 | The World Financial Review
World capitalism is experiencing the worst crisis in its 500 year history. Global capitalism is a qualitatively new stage in the open ended evolution of capitalism characterised by the rise of transnational capital, a transnational capitalist class, and a transnational state. Below, William I. Robinson argues that the global crisis is structural and threatens to become systemic, raising the specter of collapse and a global police state in the face of ecological holocaust, concentration of the means of violence, displacement of billions, limits to extensive expansion and crises of state legitimacy, and suggests that a massive redistribution of wealth and power downward to the poor majority of humanity is the only viable solution.
The New Global Capitalism and the 21st Century Crisis
The world capitalist system is arguably experiencing the worst crisis in its 500 year history. World capitalism has experienced a profound restructuring through globalisation over the past few decades and has been transformed in ways that make it fundamentally distinct from its earlier incarnations. Similarly, the current crisis exhibits features that set it apart from earlier crises of the system and raise the stakes for humanity. If we are to avert disastrous outcomes we must understand both the nature of the new global capitalism and the nature of its crisis. Analysis of capitalist globalisation provides a template for probing a wide range of social, political, cultural and ideological processes in this 21st century. Following Marx, we want to focus on the internal dynamics of capitalism to understand crisis. And following the global capitalism perspective, we want to see how capitalism has qualitatively evolved in recent decades.
The system-wide crisis we face is not a repeat of earlier such episodes such as that of the the 1930s or the 1970s precisely because capitalism is fundamentally different in the 21st century. Globalisation constitutes a qualitatively new epoch in the ongoing and open-ended evolution of world capitalism, marked by a number of qualitative shifts in the capitalist system and by novel articulations of social power. I highlight four aspects unique to this epoch.1
First is the rise of truly transnational capital and a new global production and financial system into which all nations and much of humanity has been integrated, either directly or indirectly. We have gone from a world economy, in which countries and regions were linked to each other via trade and financial flows in an integrated international market, to a global economy, in which nations are linked to each more organically through the transnationalisation of the production process, of finance, and of the circuits of capital accumulation. No single nation-state can remain insulated from the global economy or prevent the penetration of the social, political, and cultural superstructure of global capitalism. Second is the rise of a Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC), a class group that has drawn in contingents from most countries around the world, North and South, and has attempted to position itself as a global ruling class. This TCC is the hegemonic fraction of capital on a world scale. Third is the rise of Transnational State (TNS) apparatuses. The TNS is constituted as a loose network made up of trans-, and supranational organisations together with national states. It functions to organise the conditions for transnational accumulation. The TCC attempts to organise and institutionally exercise its class power through TNS apparatuses. Fourth are novel relations of inequality, domination and exploitation in global society, including an increasing importance of transnational social and class inequalities relative to North-South inequalities.
Cyclical, Structural, and Systemic Crises
Most commentators on the contemporary crisis refer to the "Great Recession" of 2008 and its aftermath. Yet the causal origins of global crisis are to be found in over-accumulation and also in contradictions of state power, or in what Marxists call the internal contradictions of the capitalist system. Moreover, because the system is now global, crisis in any one place tends to represent crisis for the system as a whole. The system cannot expand because the marginalisation of a significant portion of humanity from direct productive participation, the downward pressure on wages and popular consumption worldwide, and the polarisation of income, has reduced the ability of the world market to absorb world output. At the same time, given the particular configuration of social and class forces and the correlation of these forces worldwide, national states are hard-pressed to regulate transnational circuits of accumulation and offset the explosive contradictions built into the system.
Is this crisis cyclical, structural, or systemic? Cyclical crises are recurrent to capitalism about once every 10 years and involve recessions that act as self-correcting mechanisms without any major restructuring of the system. The recessions of the early 1980s, the early 1990s, and of 2001 were cyclical crises. In contrast, the 2008 crisis signaled the slide into astructural crisis. Structural crises reflect deeper contradictions that can only be resolved by a major restructuring of the system. The structural crisis of the 1970s was resolved through capitalist globalisation. Prior to that, the structural crisis of the 1930s was resolved through the creation of a new model of redistributive capitalism, and prior to that the structural crisis of the 1870s resulted in the development of corporate capitalism. A systemic crisis involves the replacement of a system by an entirely new system or by an outright collapse. A structural crisis opens up the possibility for a systemic crisis. But if it actually snowballs into a systemic crisis – in this case, if it gives way either to capitalism being superseded or to a breakdown of global civilisation – is not predetermined and depends entirely on the response of social and political forces to the crisis and on historical contingencies that are not easy to forecast. This is an historic moment of extreme uncertainty, in which collective responses from distinct social and class forces to the crisis are in great flux.
Hence my concept of global crisis is broader than financial. There are multiple and mutually constitutive dimensions – economic, social, political, cultural, ideological and ecological, not to mention the existential crisis of our consciousness, values and very being. There is a crisis of social polarisation, that is, of social reproduction. The system cannot meet the needs or assure the survival of millions of people, perhaps a majority of humanity. There are crises of state legitimacy and political authority, or of hegemony and domination. National states face spiraling crises of legitimacy as they fail to meet the social grievances of local working and popular classes experiencing downward mobility, unemployment, heightened insecurity and greater hardships. The legitimacy of the system has increasingly been called into question by millions, perhaps even billions, of people around the world, and is facing expanded counter-hegemonic challenges. Global elites have been unable counter this erosion of the system's authority in the face of worldwide pressures for a global moral economy. And a canopy that envelops all these dimensions is a crisis of sustainability rooted in an ecological holocaust that has already begun, expressed in climate change and the impending collapse of centralised agricultural systems in several regions of the world, among other indicators.
By a crisis of humanity I mean a crisis that is approaching systemic proportions, threatening the ability of billions of people to survive, and raising the specter of a collapse of world civilisation and degeneration into a new "Dark Ages."2
Global capitalism now couples human and natural history in such a way as to threaten to bring about what would be the sixth mass extinction in the known history of life on earth.This crisis of humanity shares a number of aspects with earlier structural crises but there are also several features unique to the present:
- The system is fast reaching the ecological limits of its reproduction. Global capitalism now couples human and natural history in such a way as to threaten to bring about what would be the sixth mass extinction in the known history of life on earth.3 This mass extinction would be caused not by a natural catastrophe such as a meteor impact or by evolutionary changes such as the end of an ice age but by purposive human activity. According to leading environmental scientists there are nine "planetary boundaries" crucial to maintaining an earth system environment in which humans can exist, four of which are experiencing at this time the onset of irreversible environmental degradation and three of which (climate change, the nitrogen cycle, and biodiversity loss) are at "tipping points," meaning that these processes have already crossed their planetary boundaries.
- The magnitude of the means of violence and social control is unprecedented, as is the concentration of the means of global communication and symbolic production and circulation in the hands of a very few powerful groups. Computerised wars, drones, bunker-buster bombs, star wars, and so forth, have changed the face of warfare. Warfare has become normalised and sanitised for those not directly at the receiving end of armed aggression. At the same time we have arrived at the panoptical surveillance society and the age of thought control by those who control global flows of communication, images and symbolic production. The world of Edward Snowden is the world of George Orwell; 1984 has arrived;
- Capitalism is reaching apparent limits to its extensive expansion. There are no longer any new territories of significance that can be integrated into world capitalism, de-ruralisation is now well advanced, and the commodification of the countryside and of pre- and non-capitalist spaces has intensified, that is, converted in hot-house fashion into spaces of capital, so that intensive expansion is reaching depths never before seen. Capitalism must continually expand or collapse. How or where will it now expand?
- There is the rise of a vast surplus population inhabiting a "planet of slums,"4 alienated from the productive economy, thrown into the margins, and subject to sophisticated systems of social control and to destruction – to a mortal cycle of dispossession-exploitation-exclusion. This includes prison-industrial and immigrant-detention complexes, omnipresent policing, militarised gentrification, and so on;
- There is a disjuncture between a globalising economy and a nation-state based system of political authority. Transnational state apparatuses are incipient and have not been able to play the role of what social scientists refer to as a "hegemon," or a leading nation-state that has enough power and authority to organise and stabilise the system. The spread of weapons of mass destruction and the unprecedented militarisation of social life and conflict across the globe makes it hard to imagine that the system can come under any stable political authority that assures its reproduction.
Global Police State
How have social and political forces worldwide responded to crisis? The crisis has resulted in a rapid political polarisation in global society. Both right and left-wing forces are ascendant. Three responses seem to be in dispute.
One is what we could call "reformism from above." This elite reformism is aimed at stabilising the system, at saving the system from itself and from more radical responses from below. Nonetheless, in the years following the 2008 collapse of the global financial system it seems these reformers are unable (or unwilling) to prevail over the power of transnational financial capital. A second response is popular, grassroots and leftist resistance from below. As social and political conflict escalates around the world there appears to be a mounting global revolt. While such resistance appears insurgent in the wake of 2008 it is spread very unevenly across countries and regions and facing many problems and challenges.
Yet another response is that I term 21stcentury fascism.5 The ultra-right is an insurgent force in many countries. In broad strokes, this project seeks to fuse reactionary political power with transnational capital and to organise a mass base among historically privileged sectors of the global working class – such as white workers in the North and middle layers in the South – that are now experiencing heightened insecurity and the specter of downward mobility. It involves militarism, extreme masculinisation, homophobia, racism and racist mobilisations, including the search for scapegoats, such as immigrant workers and, in the West, Muslims. Twenty-first century fascism evokes mystifying ideologies, often involving race/culture supremacy and xenophobia, embracing an idealised and mythical past. neofascist culture normalises and glamorises warfare and social violence, indeed, generates a fascination with domination that is portrayed even as heroic.
The need for dominant groups around the world to secure widespread, organised mass social control of the world's surplus population and rebellious forces from below gives a powerful impulse to projects of 21st century fascism. Simply put, the immense structural inequalities of the global political economy cannot easily be contained through consensual mechanisms of social control. We have been witnessing transitions from social welfare to social control states around the world. We have entered a period of great upheavals, momentous changes and uncertainties. The only viable solution to the crisis of global capitalism is a massive redistribution of wealth and power downward towards the poor majority of humanity along the lines of a 21st century democratic socialism, in which humanity is no longer at war with itself and with nature.
About the Author
William I. Robinson is professor of sociology, global and international studies, and Latin American studies, at the University of California-Santa Barbara. Among his many books are Promoting Polyarchy (1996), Transnational Conflicts (2003), A Theory of Global Capitalism (2004), Latin America and Global Capitalism (2008), and Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity (2014).
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Apr 30, 2015 | The Guardian
The emergency calls became increasingly desperate. "When are you coming? It's already burning and there are people inside," a woman told the fire brigade dispatcher. Minutes later, callers started describing how people were jumping from the upper floors. "Have you lost your minds?" one man asked, his voice breaking. "There are women and children in the building!" another man yelled.
In one of the most deadly episodes in Ukraine's turbulent 2014 power transition, 48 people were killed and hundreds injured on 2 May last year in the Black Sea port of Odessa.
Street battles culminated in a fatal fire at Soviet-era building where hundreds of pro-Russia activists were barricaded in.
VengefulRevenant -> AlfredHerring 1 May 2015 17:24
The victims are the ones who were raped, shot or burned to death in the massacre.
The perpetrators are those protected by the NATO-backed regime which has failed to investigate the massacre.
The apologists are the NATO-aligned media who blame the victims or assign blame equally to the killers and the dead along the lines of, 'There was heroism and cruelty on both sides.'
normankirk -> Metronome151 1 May 2015 16:52
Well isn't it wonderful to hear a diversity of views expressed on Russian TV. When all we hear is how all media is controlled by the Kremlin
Kaiama Danram 1 May 2015 16:48
So the dead Ukrainian children and women are Kremlin goons too? How simple your life must be to allow you to make such simplistic conclusions.
vr13vr 1 May 2015 16:46
Some nice whitewashing. Now it's fault of the victims and the heroism of the perpetrators, there hasn't been and there will be no investigation and the word massacre is no longer used. For those of you who still argue it was not a massacre but some mysterious suicide by 48 people who set themselves afire, here is footage again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxcB0PI4ZLg
Take a look at some of the pretty revealing moments:
23 min mark - Ukrainians are entering the building, there was no resistance.
24:20. A group of Ukrainians go upstairs, there is no fire yet.
26:20 Some are coming returning. The stairs are being set on fire.
27:50 A Ukrainian is firing gun at those trying to jump from the building.While in the building, Ukrainians were slaughtering people. And it wasn't a fight. Half of the victims were middle-aged. At least 10 of them - women.
31min - 33min - the victims who got out have their faces and hands disfigured while the rest of their bodies don't have the same injuries. That's what happens if someone splashes fuel over someone's face and light it up. There are pictures of victims with only their heads and hands burned.
33min - 35min - there were women among those trying to find safety in the building. Some of them are middle-aged. They were not fighters, as the article would imply.
36min- 37min - Ukrainians were inside the building, setting it on fire and killing those whom they could find, a young woman in this specific frame.
46min - a person was bludgeoned to death. The room doesn't have marks of fire but the blood is splattered all over the room.
48min-50min - the same story, Ukrainians were slaughtering their victims.
1h:00min - Ukrainians are entering the building again, this time from the make shift scaffolding.
Any attempt to pretend there was a fight rather than a massacre is crazy. Any suggestion that somehow people inside were setting themselves on fire is ludicrous in light of evidence that the Ukis were inside the building. And the fact that Kiev doesn't even see it as murder makes me just angry.
AbsolutelyFapulous -> PlatonKuzin 1 May 2015 16:43
Odessa as well as the most Ukraine is a Russian soil.
Donno why you are commenting here. You even don't seem to be able to read a map.
BorninUkraine -> RonBuckley 1 May 2015 16:25
In a way, you are right, it was the US (via Vicky "f the EU" Nuland and mad John McCain) that pushed Ukraine over the cliff. As usual, the EU "leaders" (Merkel, etc) acted as US lackeys.
However, equal blame goes to stupid and thieving Ukrainian elites, under whose "leadership" the country was on the edge of that cliff to begin with.
Current Ukrainian "leaders" keep stealing everything they can, including financial and material aid from the West. What else is new?
MaoChengJi -> Goodthanx 1 May 2015 16:03
Yeah. I'm convinced that they should've sent paratroopers and take Kiev right the next day after the coup d'etat; stop this whole unholy mess right then and there. That really would've saved tens of thousands of lives - if not millions, seeing how this thing seems to escalate, leading us to a nuclear war.
Putin is a pussy, Medvedev got it right in Georgia in 2008. Well, frankly Medvedev is a pussy too. He should've taken Tbilisi, and put Saakashvili on trial.
To teach the bastards a lesson.
Instead, now we hear every day 'Russia will not fight Ukraine', 'Russia will not fight Ukraine', and the murdering Nazi bastards get bolder and bolder. What's the point of having all that military hardware if you're afraid to use it. They Yanks would've taken control of the place months ago, look at Grenada.
RonBuckley -> BorninUkraine 1 May 2015 15:52
Well said, man. Yes, Ukrainian politics have always been divisive, stupid, thievery and corrupt. That said they had neither brains nor money for a coup. So Ukraine should thank certain external powers for the deep shit it is in now.
PlatonKuzin -> puttypants 1 May 2015 15:31
Odessa as well as the most Ukraine is a Russian soil. That's the point. And the state of Ukraine is a temporary occupier of the Russian soil. So people living in Odessa don't have to go to Russian. They are right at their home. This is the state of Ukraine that has stayed on our Russian land for 23 years now. It's time for the quasi-state of Ukraine to leave.
BorninUkraine -> puttypants 1 May 2015 15:16
I was born in Lvov in Western Ukraine, I grew up in Lugansk in the East, I have friends and relatives all over, and I know exactly what is going on in Ukraine.
Ukraine in 1991 was extremely heterogenous. In the area West of Carpatian mountains people speak Hungarian, Romanian, and Rusine (a form of old Russian, spoken in Kievan Rus).
Galichina and Volynia in the West speak several dialects of Ukrainian. Many in Central Ukraine speak what is considered literary Ukrainian. In the South and East (historic Novorossia) and in Kharkov region (historic Slobozhanschina) the majority speaks "surgik", a mix of pidgin-Ukrainian and pidgin-Russian. Finally, in Crimea people speak Russian, Tatar, and very few speak Ukrainian. Crimea voted AGAINST Ukraine in 1991 referendum and got a chance to run away in 2014, when Ukraine committed suicide.
If the leaders of Ukraine had any brains and loved their country, they would have followed the example of Switzerland and Singapore, having many official languages. However, all Ukrainian rulers from day one were thieves and idiots. They made Ukrainian the only official language and pushed it everywhere, so that while you could get school education in several languages, all colleges operated only in Ukrainian, putting people who spoke other languages at a disadvantage.
That idiotic policy started this whole mess, which with a bit of US money, prodding, and now arms became a civil war. Not to mention that Galichina is the place that fought against Russia in WWI (as part of Austro-Hungarian empire, siding with Kaiser) and WWII (siding with Hitler). They supplied the troops that under Hitler's command murdered thousands of civilians in Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, and Slovakia. Bandera, Shuhevich, and veterans of Waffen SS division Galichina, who are considered heroes by current puppets in Kiev, voluntarily served Hitler.
80% of Ukrainian population hates these Bandera worshippers, so when external forces push them to power, it creates trouble. Personally I hate them for giving a bad name to everything Ukrainian.
BorninUkraine -> AbsolutelyFapulous 1 May 2015 15:10
Russia failed to send its troops to Donbass, and Ukrainian army killed thousands of civilians there, including women, children, elderly, and disabled veterans.
Or is saying things explicitly beyond your pay grade?
RonBuckley -> AbsolutelyFapulous 1 May 2015 15:06
To Odessa Kiev sent a few hundred pro-Nazi thugs - 42 died.
To Donetsk and Luhansk Kiev sent a few thousand pro-Nazi thugs plus the entire Ukrainian army - 6000 died.
Get it now?
Goodthanx -> Anette Mor 1 May 2015 15:04
For me it was the silence... You are right! Seeing what i was seeing, with no commentry to convince me either way.. How could the worlds media be so silent?
Then with MH, it was the complete opposite!! Immediately and with no investigation, MSM could not shut up about who they thought was responsible!!
Both fail the logic test miserably. But try explaining common sense to those that haven't any.
Goodthanx -> Chirographer 1 May 2015 14:48
Those protesters were Ukrainian Pro Federalists! Not one Russian amongst them!
Anette Mor -> Goodthanx 1 May 2015 14:46
Good for you. It is impossible to hide truth with current state of technology. Only not showning. Any life reporting give the footage adding facts one by one and crwating a true picture eventually. Even this rather bias article contributes to true story because the lie in it sticks out of logic for anybody we is able to think for themselves.
PlatonKuzin -> ID5868758 1 May 2015 14:42
Western media are not simply mirror images of the fascist governments they support. Acting the way they do, these media prepare the public for a future war.
Anette Mor -> vr13vr 1 May 2015 14:41
It is poinless to try to install fear in these people. Need to look at the history of people's wars in Russia. Since 17 century they were able to resist occupation and unwanted rulers by people war. There wpuld not be a win against Napoleon and Hitler without people rising and forming resistance. Same in Odessa now. Just a matter of time.
BunglyPete -> Chirographer 1 May 2015 14:35
The explanation is very simple. Right Sector had free reign to terrorise pro Russians, so he took action. Kiev choose not to punish Right Sector both then and now. He said this in the same interview you constantly reference.
Now can you explain why you think it is acceptable for Right Sector to terrorise the Donbass? If Strelkov wasnt allowed to defend them, who was?
Anette Mor -> Jeff1000 1 May 2015 14:34
Not sure why you call them pro-Russians. Odessa is multi-national city. These who were massacred are simply local people who disagreed with the violent coup which put to power by the west. Does it make them "pro-russian" and justify thier killing? Surely these who want own country to be coverned by own elected officials could not be pro- another country. If they trust Russian government care for them more then thier own coup, that only says how bad the coup rule is.
Goodthanx -> Chirographer 1 May 2015 14:24
Forget about the Russian government. The idea is justice for the victims and punishment for the perpetrators. Is it the ambition of the UN to be percieved as bias as so called Russuan investigators would be?
Kaiama -> truk10 1 May 2015 14:22
FFS there are enough links and analysis to demonstrate that pro-Kiev forces inflicted a massacre of civilians here. I don't see any pro-Ukraine links to additional information but an overwhelming deluge of links supporting the unvoiced version of events.
ID5868758 1 May 2015 14:18
Our western media have really become mirror images of the fascist governments they support. By publishing such whitewashing attempts as this, they only enable more such behavior in the future, behavior that leads to the deaths of more innocents, more civilians whose only desire is to live in freedom and peace.
Kaiama 1 May 2015 14:13
It is so depressing when there is far more information in the comments section than in the article itself. It seems the new editor is keen to continue the traditions of her predecessor.
Goodthanx -> Chirographer 1 May 2015 14:09
What kind of a teenage girl carries in their backpack petrol, empty bottles, rags and whatever else is required to make Molotov cocktails? What a coincidence... there is a group of them!!
As for Right Sector? Chartered buses transported Right Sector militia which arrived early in the day. These were the people communicating with police from the start.MaoChengJi -> MaoChengJi 1 May 2015 13:51
Speaking of the media... I've been reading this Odessa news website: http://timer-odessa.net/ , and it has been relatively informative (as much as Ukro-sites can be, these days). And today suddenly it's gone dark: "there is no Web site at this address".
Does anyone know if it's gone for good? I really hope those who were running it are safe...
Jean-François Guilbo -> truk10 1 May 2015 13:51So you didn't watch the video link in my comment did you?
If you just take this article for granted to know on which side the Odessa police was, you won't learn much on what happened...
Seems like the officier on the picture would have been recognised as a colonel from Odessa police, watch this link:http://orientalreview.org/2014/05/06/genocide-in-novorossiya-and-swan-song-of-ukrainian-statehood/
And from these two links, these armed guys not afraid to shoot from the crowd, could have been agents provocateur...
BorninUkraine -> IrishFred 1 May 2015 13:47
Are you saying that Bandera, Shuhevich, and veterans of Waffen SS division Galichina never existed? If so, please state it explicitly.
Are you saying all of the above did not serve Hitler voluntarily? If so, please state it explicitly.
Are you saying all of the above are not guilty of mass murder and other crimes against humanity? If so, please state it explicitly.Are you saying that people who are murdering their opponents, politicians and journalists, are not Nazis? If so, please state it explicitly.
As to Crimea, if you knew any history, you'd know that it was illegally annexed by Ukraine in 1991. Here is history 101, not necessarily for you, but for those who actually want to know the truth.
Crimea voted AGAINST Ukraine in 1991 referendum. Ukraine illegally repealed Crimean 1992 constitution and cancelled Crimean autonomy against the wishes of Crimean population in 1994.
BTW, several Western sources recently confirmed the results of Crimean referendum of 2014.
Forbes magazine
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2015/03/20/one-year-after-russia-annexed-crimea-locals-prefer-moscow-to-kiev/German polling company GFK
http://www.gfk.com/ua/Documents/Presentations/GFK_report_FreeCrimea.pdfGallup
http://www.bbg.gov/wp-content/media/2014/06/Ukraine-slide-deck.pdfRussia deployed its troops in Crimea, and nobody was killed there. Russia failed to send its troops to Donbass, and Ukrainian army killed thousands of civilians there, including women, children, elderly, and disabled veterans.
As many Ukrainians joke now, "Crimeans are traitors: they ran away without us".
Your next argument?Jeff1000 -> Chirographer 1 May 2015 13:45
Don't display callous and willful ignorance and call it even-handedness. The Guardian's "credible" account offers no sources, agrees with none of the available pictorial or video evidence and is rampant apologism.
I posted videos - including raw CCTV footage of the starting of the fire, further up the page.
BunglyPete -> coffeegirl 1 May 2015 13:40
I saw that guy's post it was fantastic, very well sourced and thorough. The comments on here were a different kettle of fish entirely back then.
Jeff1000 1 May 2015 13:39
The attempt to re-package this event as some awful conglomeration of circumstances spurred on by the cruelty of fate is sickening. We reduce the death of at least 50 people down so that calling it a "massacre" becomes needlessly emotive. We casually refer to the pro-Ukrainians as "football fans" to make it seem innocent - when Ukrainian football fans known as "Ultras" are famours for 2 things: Being neo-Nazis, and being violent thugs.
Look at this video especially: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAEcceedzCU
It's really very simple - candid videos at the time made it clear.
1. Pro-Russian groups were attacked by Ukrainian "ultras". They sought shelter in the Trade Union building.
2. The building was set on fire when the Ultras threw molotovs through the windows. The doors were barred.
3. People attempting to climb out of the windows were shot at, if they jumped they were beaten as they lay on the ground.
4. Ukrainian nationalists deliberately blockaded the streets to inhibit the progress of ambulances and fire engines.
5. The Police pretty much let all this happen.
It's all in the videos - just go to youtube. Helping Kiev cover its backside is despicable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKpJ1-ECpPg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4dJRnI-X8Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ec0mgpwW6_YBunglyPete
At entrance to underpass guys with baseball bats are asking passersby: "are you for Odessa or Moscow?" The right answer is Odessa. - @howardamos
From the Guardian report on May 2 2014, by Howard Amos,
"The aim is to completely clear Odessa [of pro-Russians]," said Dmitry Rogovsky, another activist from Right Sector
According to the lady that setup the May 2 Group most victims had blunt trauma, and 30 had gunshot wounds.
Ah the difference a year makes.
coffeegirl -> coffeegirl 1 May 2015 13:33
coffeegirl 1 May 2015 13:30
Only a week after The Odessa Massacre an american CiFer, ex-marine, has gathered links, sieved through hours and hours of video - he, practically, has done what the journos were supposed to do, - to prove the Guardian, BBC and the rest were trying hard to whitewash the atrocity. Check his posts: Additional proof that the BBC and the mainstream Western press lied when they said both sides threw the molotov's.
I looked for 5 hours searching for one video that showed anyone in the building throwing a molotov cocktail as the BBC first reported and the rest of the MSM went along with. I could not find a single one. They claimed a person named Sergei (what are the odds of that) told them a person threw the molotov inside the building and didn't realize the window was closed. This is absolutely ludicrous and an example of the pathetic reporting that passes for "news" these days.
I did find the video of the third floor fire starting. It is at the following link and runs consecutively. You'll notice at exactly the 2 minute mark the camera zooms in on the window where the fire begins. You'll also notice that at the 2:02 mark you see an additional molotov cocktail just miss the window. This is strong evidence that the window was being targeted by individuals on the ground. Prior to this fire starting there is no other fire on the third floor, therefore this is most likely the cause of the third floor fire and lends credence to the fact that the violent youth below burned those people alive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9AMjLBIliw#t=125
Here's a link to the BBC article that quotes a random guy named Sergei and provides no evidence whatsoever to back up their story .http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27275383
MaoChengJi -> Jeff1000 1 May 2015 13:24And not just "Russian state-owned media" - also most of the Russian privately owned media, and most of the world media (and even some of the western media).
I believe I saw a chinadaily calling it Kristallnacht.
Jeff1000 1 May 2015 13:16
Russian state-owned media characterised the day's events as a "massacre" planned by "fascists" in Kiev, a narrative that has gained widespread traction.
Mostly because it's a pretty fitting description of what happened.
John Smith -> truk10 1 May 2015 13:15
No, there are no nazis in Ukraine. All Kremlin lies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDqk-uvYn4EGoodthanx -> truk10 1 May 2015 13:11
Its not hard truk. Those red armbands that the so called pro Russian provocatores wore? Are actually the same red armbands Right sector militia was wearing during the most violent Maidan clashes. You can identify some of the same protagonists wearing the same armband in both Odesaa and Maidan!
vr13vr -> truk10 1 May 2015 13:07
Idiot. Nobody is laughing. Especially when 50 people died. Look at this video and see how Ukrainians entered the supposedly "heavily defended" building. You will see them operating inside, you will see them existing the building after it started burning from inside.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxcB0PI4ZLg
Look at 23 min mark - they are entering the building with no resistance.
24:20. A group of Ukrainians go upstairs, there is no fire yet.
26:20 Some are coming returning. The stairs are being set on fire.
27:50 A Ukrainian is firing gun at those trying to jump from the building.Yes, Ukrainians overrun the building, including the roof. The photographs suggest that people in the building where set afire while still alive.
You must be an idiot to say someone is laughing at this.
castorsia -> truk10 1 May 2015 13:02
No. They burned them. Check the photographic evidence.
PlatonKuzin -> vr13vr 1 May 2015 12:58
Armored vehicles and special riot forces were brought today in Odessa to prevent possible unrest there.
WHYNOPASSWORD12 -> Havingalavrov 1 May 2015 12:56
Plenty of witnesses point out that these were pro-ukraine provacateurs sent up to stir up trouble. They are wearing the same red armbands worn by a group who started the skirmishes earlier in the town centre. They were part of the group bussed-in under the guise of football supporters.
MaoChengJi -> truk10 1 May 2015 12:55
Hi turk10,
I understand your confusion. Luckily, Mr. Christof Lehmann investigated it all for you. Seek and ye shall find. Use google.vr13vr 1 May 2015 12:50
Sure, Kiev views burning alive almost 50 people as a "victory." They even allowed to install fear in the city. Since then the city is totally subdued, people would be afraid to even discuss the events or think of any peaceful opposition as they are aware of the potential response from Kiev's supporters.
Nice job Guardian trying to whitewash the events and justify the cold blooded murder by some street fights elsewhere in the city, events that were taking place all over the country those days.
Jeremn -> oleteo 1 May 2015 12:40
No greater cynics than western politicians, who certainly don't mourn this heavenly half-hundred, or come to lay flowers at the scene of their death.
No greater cynic than the Czech envoy, Bartuska, who said:
"Groups of civilians - including men, women and children - seize government buildings. Within two days they get arms and after that women and children disappear, leaving only the armed men. If they [independence supporters] are quickly resisted, as it was done in Odessa where they were simply burned to death, or Dnepropetrovsk, where they were simply killed and buried by the side of the road, everything will be calm. If this is not done, then there will be war. That's all."
ID5868758 1 May 2015 12:18
Another despicable attempt to paint a false equivalency, to assign blame for this massacre, for their own deaths, on those who perished. Take the Molotov cocktail throwing, for instance. I watched the videos of those Molotov cocktails being made, pretty little pro-Ukrainian girls sitting on the ground with their assembly line all set up, smiling as they made those instruments of death and handed them out, now just where did those supplies come from, who thought to bring bottles and rags and fuel to an event if it was innocent in nature?
And where would those innocent victims chased inside the building get Molotov cocktails to throw from inside the building, when they were interested only in escaping the smoke and flames, saving their own lives? The narrative doesn't match the evidence, but neither does it pass the smell test, pretty SOP for western media reporting on Ukraine.
StillHaveLinkYouHate -> MaoChengJi 1 May 2015 11:56
The difference is that Nazis want to murder people for the accident of how they were born. Extreme natinalists will want to murder anybody who does not behave in the perverted way they feel a patriot should.
That is the difference. Praviy sektor are nazis, incidentally.
MaoChengJi 1 May 2015 11:55
Here's another opinion:
http://darussophile.com/2014/05/massacre-in-odessa/It makes the point already made below in this comment thread:
I invite people to imagine how the British media would have reported this massacre if roles had been reversed and if it had been Maidan supporters who were burnt alive in the Trade Union building with an anti Maidan crowd filmed throwing Molotov cocktails into the building whilst baying for blood outside.
Indeed.
GreatCthulhu -> Metronome151 1 May 2015 11:45
Many of them not locals.
I thought the article was pretty clear that everyone on both sides were local. I speak, of course s an Irish man who doesn't regard hating Russians/ people who identify with Russia who aren't Russians but live nearby as a default position before beginning any debate.
There are a small minority of Irish people, living in the Republic (I am not referring to the northern Unionist Community here), who identify with Britain often to the point that they express regret that Ireland ever left the UK. I don't agree with them, but I would not set them on fire in a building. For that matter, it is ARGUABLE (I am not saying whether that argument is right or wrong- just that you could put forward the thesis) that the N.I state-let is something of an Irish Donbass. No justification for Ireland shelling the crap out of it though... at all... that sort of stuff is kind of regarded as savagery here these days.
MaoChengJi -> truk10 1 May 2015 11:43Hi turk10,
what's wrong with calling them 'nazis'? The guardian piece identifies them as "extreme nationalists", and isn't it the same thing as 'neo-nazis' or 'nazis'?Is there some nuance I'm missing here? What would you call them?
BorninUkraine -> truk10 1 May 2015 11:38
So you object to calling a spade a spade? Typical pro-US position in Ukrainian crisis. What do you call the insignia of, for example, Azov battalion (see here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Battalion ). If that's not Nazi insignia, I don't know what is.
I am simply saying that those who organized Odessa massacre, then Mariupol massacre, then fueled the war in Donbass, including Poroshenko, Turchinov, Yats, etc, are Nazis.The simple reason for that conclusion is, as the saying goes, "if it looks like a duck, if it walks like a duck, if it quacks like a duck, it is a duck". If you prefer Christian version of the same thing, see Mathew 7:16 "you will know them by their fruits".
To sum it up, if someone behaves like a Nazi, s/he is a Nazi. Is this clear enough?
EugeneGur 1 May 2015 11:28
A pro-Russia activist aims a pistol at supporters of the Kiev government during clashes in the streets of Odessa, 2 May 2014.
How do we know that the guy is pro-Russian? Does the picture show what he is aiming at? Does he have a sign on his forehead burned in saying "I am pro-Russian and I am going to shoot that pro-Ukrainian bastard"? No, he does not. We are expected to assume that because the caption says so - but captions to pictures aren't evidence. Anybody can put any caption to any picture, and it's been done many a time.
The head of the local pro-Ukraine Maidan self-defence group, Dmitry Gumenyuk, recalled the effect of the homemade grenades. . . they threw a grenade and it exploded under his bullet-proof vest and four nails entered his lungs," he said.
Such peaceful people - going for a nice in the park walk in bullet-proof vests. They were going to destroy that camp and not on the agreement with the activists in that camp, as Guardian states (complete BS) but violently, which they did. Even if they were attacked, what did women in the camp have to do with it?
Come on, people, even in the face of such a tragedy, is it so absolutely necessary to hush up the truth all the time?BorninUkraine -> caliento 1 May 2015 11:24
There is a Ukrainian joke. Russians ask:
- If you believe that Russia annexed Crimea, why don't you fight for it?
- We aren't that stupid, there are Russian troops there.
- But you say there are Russian troops in Donbass?
- That's what we say, but in Crimea there really are Russian troops.castorsia 1 May 2015 11:21
The Guardian continues to misrepresent the Odesa massacre by reporting claims by the official Ukrainian investigation and the Odesa governor created May 2 group that the deadly fire started when both sided were throwing Molotov cocktails. The videos and other evidence showing that the fire started after the Molotov cocktails and tires were thrown by the attackers are deliberately omitted.
Open question to you all: What would be in the headlines if scores of "Pro-Ukrainian activists " were being burned, hacked, mauled, shot and raperd to death by Donetsk rebels or their supporters?
BorninUkraine 1 May 2015 11:20
There are lies, there are blatant lies, and then there are reports of Western media. Sad, but true.
In this article Howard Amos pretends that he believes that both sides were to blame for the mass murder of anti-fascists by pro-Maidan thugs in Odessa on May 2, 2014. That's like saying that both the Nazis and the inmates of concentration camps were equally guilty.
This lie is so outrageous, and so far from reality, that it does not even deserve an argument. The readers who want to know the truth can do Google search using "Odessa massacre 2014" and read for themselves.The lie that the Guardian repeats after Kyiv "government" looks even less plausible now, as Odessa massacre was followed by the massacre of civilians by Nazi thugs in Mariupol a few days later (change Odessa to Mariupol in your Google search), and the murder of thousands of civilians in Donbass, including women, children, elderly, and disabled veterans, by the Ukrainian army and Nazi battalions.
I grew up in the USSR, but I have never read a lie so obvious and outrageous in the Soviet media. Congratulations on a new low!
coffeegirl aussiereader4 1 May 2015 11:11
Sounds like you know little about what happened in Odessa.
The best compilation of any available material was done on May 8, 2014 by our fellow CiFer US ex-marine griffin alabama:
EugeneGur Chirographer 1 May 2015 11:10
You like to cite Strelkov, don't you, when it suits your purpose? If he is such an authority for you, why don't you cite everything he says? Among other things, he said that Maidan was not a popular uprising but a pure decoration for the coup organized by the right wing groups and funded by oligarchs together with the foreign agents? You can watch this here
http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/2015/02/must-watch-strelkov-vs-starikov-debate.htmlgreatwhitehunter caliento 1 May 2015 11:08
you would no if you followed events the idea of peace keepers was supported by Russia, the separatists and a good many other countries right from the start of the conflict . It was not however supported by the kiev government or the US. Peace keepers were offered to Ukraine right up until 4 days before the Minsk agreement.
Kiev's solution has always been a military one and still is. There belated cries for peace keepers only came after getting an a*& kicking.
kiev signed the minsk agreement which requires them to deal with the issues peace keepers would be a way out for them. Usa by their actions does not support the Minsk agreement.
Poroshenko,s idea of peace keepers was a few kiev friendly states to send weapons and troups to bolster their ranks.
An offer was made via the UN security council for a peace keeping force that included china and new zealand and poroshenko stated that ukraine didn't needed china and new Zealand's help, as it turned out they did.
EugeneGur 1 May 2015 10:54
Oh Guardian, Guardian. Both are to blame, heroism on both sides - in short, they burned themselves. We've heard that before. But then the article goes on and tells you that the movement they for some reason call "pro-Russian", although its not pro-Russia as much as it's anti-fascist, is essentially eliminated, with all leaders in jail or in exile. In contrast,
None of the pro-Ukraine activists have been put on trial
Kind of tells you what actually happened, doesn't it?
Activists from both sides admit that the port city remains divided into two approximately matched camps
No, they aren't matched. The Odessa residents are mostly anti-Maidan. The city is flooded with newcomers from the western Ukraine, and they the main supporters of Kiev. Otherwise, why would Kiev deploy half of the army to Odessa before the May holidays?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7firu0g4tU
Recently Poroshenko who had the temerity to visit Odessa on the anniversary of the city' liberation from occupation was met with shouts "Fascism will not pass".
So much for "matched camps". Of course, if you put everybody of the opposing view in jail of kill them, you can sort of achieve a "match".
Elena Hodgson 1 May 2015 10:50
This was a massacre. Period.
Hanwell123 1 May 2015 10:48
Ukraine is a gangster state where if activists aren't arrested then they are shot; 6 prominent figures shot this year alone. No arrests. It's supported to the hilt by the EU who shell out enormous sums to keep it from bankruptcy.
nnedjo 1 May 2015 08:42This is the news from the Ukraine crisis Media Center:
Odesa, April 27, 2015 – Vitaly Kozhukhar, coordinator of the Self-Defense of Odesa, Varvara Chernoivanenko, a spokesman for the Right Sector of Odesa held a briefing on the topic: "May 2 this year in Odesa. How a single headquarters of the patriotic forces preparing to hold a day of mourning for those killed in the city"...
Varvara Chernoivanenko said that for all patriots of Ukraine is important that May 2 was peaceful day. Patriotic forces create patrols that will keep order in the area of Cathedral Square, which will host a memorial meeting for all those, who died on 2 May. They will make every effort to ensure peace and order. Already, the city has operational headquarters of the patriotic forces. Their representatives will stop all provocations. At the same time, according to Varvara Chernoivanenko, on their part will not be any aggression.Thus, the "patriotic forces", which I suppose are responsible for burning people alive in the building of Trade Unions in Odessa, will now protect those who survived and who should hold the memorial service for their relatives and friends, victims of Odessa massacre. The only question is, from whom they should protect them?
I mean, this lady from the Right Sector boasts that they organized patrols of its members all over the city. Well, you can bet that in these patrols will be at least some, if not all of those who threw Molotov cocktails at the building of trade unions, and beaten with clubs or even shot at those who tried to escape from the fire. Because, as this article shows, none of them has even been charged, let alone be convicted of that crime.
So, can we then conclude that the executioners of the victims of the Odessa massacre will now provide protection to those who mourn the victims, which is a paradox of its kind.
And how these patrols of "patriotic forces" operating in reality, you can watch in this video, which was filmed during the visit of Poroshenko in Odessa, on the day of the celebration of liberation of the city in WWII, 10 April. At the beginning of the film, the guys from "Patriotic patrol" argue with a group of anti-fascists, demanding that they reject one of their flag. And then at one point (0:31 of the video), one of these guys from patrol says:
"Didn't burn enough of you, eh?"
MaoChengJi 1 May 2015 07:45Ah, of course: both sides are to blame, because before the massacre an extreme nationalist militant died, under circumstanced unknown (shot in self-defense, perhaps? who knows).
Nice.
a pro-Ukraine member of the extreme nationalist organisation
Even nicer: 'pro-Ukraine extreme nationalist'. Pro-Ukraine? Which kind of Ukraine?
I find that one of the most misleading elements in these west-interpreted stories is "pro-Russian" and "pro-Ukrainian" labels.
The so-called "pro-Russian" side is, in fact, pro-Ukraine and anti-fascist. Here's a photo (from wikipedia) of some of the people (or their comrades) who were massacred in Odessa a year ago:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/RussianSpringOdessa20140420_08.JPG6i9vern 1 May 2015 07:43
Truth? One doesn't look for truth in the Graun - the house journal of European Post-Democracy.
The truth will occasionally slip out of one of the Post-Democrats - the Czech diplomat Vaclav Bartuska, for example:
"Groups of civilians - including men, women and children - seize government buildings. Within two days they get arms and after that women and children disappear, leaving only the armed men. If they are quickly resisted, as it was done in Odessa where they were simply burned to death, or Dnepropetrovsk, where they were simply killed and buried by the side of the road, everything will be calm. If this is not done, then there will be war. That's all."
The journos of the Graun who want to carry on attending their dinner parties and pretend to be liberal and decent folk have better sense than to state matters truthfully.
6i9vern 1 May 2015 07:43Truth? One doesn't look for truth in the Graun - the house journal of European Post-Democracy.
The truth will occasionally slip out of one of the Post-Democrats - the Czech diplomat Vaclav Bartuska, for example:
"Groups of civilians - including men, women and children - seize government buildings. Within two days they get arms and after that women and children disappear, leaving only the armed men. If they are quickly resisted, as it was done in Odessa where they were simply burned to death, or Dnepropetrovsk, where they were simply killed and buried by the side of the road, everything will be calm. If this is not done, then there will be war. That's all."
The journos of the Graun who want to carry on attending their dinner parties and pretend to be liberal and decent folk have better sense than to state matters truthfully.
Vladimir Makarenko Celtiberico 1 May 2015 06:20They took it from Odessa being a symbol of Black Sea and a while ago a Russian poet said: Chernoe More - Vor na Vore.
Black Sea - a thief by thief.normankirk 1 May 2015 06:14
This is a shameless attempt to whitewash a massacre.There is plenty of evidence on you tube Every one has cell phones which can record events as they unfold. This is why the American police can no longer get away with murder. The European parliament held a hearing in Brussels to hear the Odessa survivors. there was a concerted effort from Maidan activists from Kiev to shut down the survivors testimony. A Europarliament deputy from the Czech republic Miroslav said "This is simply shocking. this is an evidence of fascism not being disappeared from European countries.He blamed Parubiy, co founder of far right Svoboda party and Kolomoisky, paymaster of neo nazi militia for the massacre at Odessa. All this is recorded. Ignorance can no longer be a defence
ID075732 1 May 2015 05:53The US Holocaust Memorial Museum quotes the following, famous text by Pastor Martin Niemoller about the cowardice of intellectuals following the Nazis':
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out-
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out-
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out-
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me-and there was no one left to speak for me.It's time for the MSM to realise that the same is happening Ukraine - for which the Odessa massacre is a warning. It's time they stopped playing intellectual games to prop up what is a fascist regime in Kiev.
BunglyPete 1 May 2015 05:48Just in case those involved in the production of this article do read or hear of these comments.. Do you not realise we have Google and Youtube now? You can verify anything within a few keystrokes.
You do not need to rely on the evil Russian media, you can watch the eyewitness videos yourself.
I mean this seriously, if you are going to attempt to prove something then at least realise that you will need to go to more lengths to do so. In the context of the greater 'propaganda war', articles like this are nonsensical, as you merely serve to discredit yourself, and encourage people to move to alternative media sources.
If you want to discredit the Russian narrative then discredit it, don't write things that discredit your own narrative.
You don't need to bill me for this advice it comes for free.
SHappens 1 May 2015 04:30Many allege that investigators are dragging their feet for political reasons, possibly to cover up high-level complicity.
At the beginning of the unrest, the most virulent reaction came from supporters of Ukrainian football clubs. But they were soon joined by a well-organized gang of self-defense that came in a column of about 100 people dressed in military fatigues and relatively well equipped.
Members of the Ukrainian security forces withdrew from the scene allowing the rightwing radicals to block the exits and firebomb the building forcing many to jump from open windows to the pavement below where they died on impact. The few who survived the fall were savagely beaten with clubs and chains by the nearly 300 extremist thugs who had gathered on the street.Street fighting thugs don't typically waste their time barricading exits unless it is part of a plan, a plan to create a big-enough incident to change the narrative of what is going on in the country. None of the victims of the tragedy were armed.
This isn't the first time the US has tried to pull something like this off. In 2006, the Bush administration used a similar tactic in Iraq. That's when Samarra's Golden Dome Mosque was blown up in an effort to change the public's perception of the conflict from an armed struggle against foreign occupation into a civil war.
So who authorized the attack on Odessa's Trade Unions House? Could it be that the Ukrainian Security Services were supervised by some external mercenaries just like the Oluja blitzkrieg in Croatia back in 1995 when the Croatian National Guard was then supervised and managed by MPRI, an US SMP based in Virginia? Because in Kiev, dozens of specialists from the US CIA and FBI were advising the Ukrainian government helping Kiev end the rebellion in the east of Ukraine and set up a functioning security structure. (report, AFP).
Whatever and if ever an inquiry succeeds, fact is that the government in Kiev bears direct responsibility, and is complicit in these criminal activities for they allowed extremists and radicals to burn unarmed people alive.
warehouse_guy 1 May 2015 04:30
Tatyana Gerasimova also says the case is getting killed off in court, put that on your headline.
alpykog 1 May 2015 04:30
Nothing unusual about police, army and terrorists working together. I remember the British army in Belfast actually running joint patrols in broad daylight with Loyalist terrorists through Catholic areas and that was the tip of the iceberg. Try not to feel "holier than thou" when you read this stuff.
ID075732 1 May 2015 04:23
Rumours swirl of a higher death toll, the use of poisonous gas and the body of a pregnant woman garrotted by pro-Ukraine fanatics.
Clearly the author has not watched the footage filmed inside the building after the massacre - this was no "swirling rumour". Clearly the footage wasn't faked either. It showed may murdered victims with burns to their heads and arms with bodies and clothes unscorched, not caused by the actual fire.
Also those that have studied the many videos available of the unfolding events saw a much more an orchestrated attack on the Trade Union building with fires breaking out in rooms further away from the seat of the original fire. Also two masked figures on the roof before the fire started in the building.
Reports that the exits were blocked and a number of masked pro-Ukrainians were inside the building not just on the roof, don't figure in this report.
ploughmanlunch 1 May 2015 03:41
'While many pro-Ukraine activists helped the rescue effort, others punched, kicked and beat those who fled the burning building. "There was blood and water all over the courtyard," said Elena, who escaped via a fireman's ladder. "They were shouting 'on your knees, on your knees'."
This sums up, in my opinion, the whole sordid mess that is present Ukraine.
The majority of ordinary Ukrainians living under the authority of Kiev will broadly agree with their Government, but are civilised and are probably horrified by the violence perpetrated by both sides in the war.
Unfortunately, however, there is a significant minority of extremist Ukrainian Nationalists that readily resort to violence and intimidation and revile Russian speaking 'separatists' in the Donbas ( and elsewhere ).
Even more unfortunately, the fanatical far right have a disproportionate influence in the Kiev Parliament and even the Government; a fact conveniently overlooked by the incredibly indulgent Western powers. The present Kiev regime is blatantly anti-democratic and lacks any humanitarian concern for the desperate plight of citizens still living in Donbas, ( unpaid pensions, economic and humanitarian blockade ).
This crisis still has a long way to go, and I believe has not yet reached it's nadir. A brighter future for all the people of Ukraine will require unbiased and honest involvement of the great powers, East and West.
Geo kosmopolitenko 1 May 2015 03:22
Some spin doctors in Washington would sarcastically smile if they ever read this sadly tragic article.
Kiselev 1 May 2015 03:20
Symbol of separated Ukrainian society...
Whatever western Ukrainians told us.
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We who have been opposing the specific political and economic form of capitalism known as "neoliberalism" now find ourselves in a quandry: in the United States of America, we find neoliberalism falling rapidly to fascism.
What would move us to such a drastic assessment of developments in the USA?
Recall the basics of neoliberalism: the coercion of the excluded by the power of money, disguised as "liberation" and as "internationalism." We who oppose neoliberalism have struggled to unveil the power of money behind these masks.
With the rise of fascism, the power of money casts aside its mask in favour of a steel helmet, with bludgeons, guns, and all other sorts of weapons of mass destruction to go with it, together with a eagerness to use these weapons at the slightest provocation against all opponents, foreign and domestic.
The primary justification of gringo fascism is now "war on terrorism," with which the USA threatens to become the world's terrorist superpower.
These principles are enshrined in the "Project for a New American Century," the "USA Patriot Law," the "Defence Security Enhancement Proposal," and other equally frightening activities of the United States government.
Like all fascist governments before it, this United States government knows no law other than naked force: not international law, nor its own Constitution, can constrain this fascist government or its supporters.
This is the government that seeks to influence the path other governments take, including the government of Mexico.
We in the Mexican national liberation movement must join with all progressive forces in denouncing the criminal intentions of the United States government, and must warn the Mexican government that if it chooses to follow the example of that government, it will share in its fate.
We who oppose neoliberalism aren't completely surprised to find it decaying into fascism: the seeds of the self-destruction of the neoliberal project have been evident to us all along.
Nevertheless, we must now turn from the strategies and tactics appropriate to combatting neoliberalism to those reserved for the antifascist struggle.
The fascists will give us no quarter: we must give them no quarter.
We must solemnly warn those who don't realise that they are treading down the fascist path that their ignorance will not excuse them. Those who take the fascist road knowing that they do so must understand that fascism has never prevailed and never will, but rather will result in destruction of all they hold dear. Those who seek to be the agents of destruction of both neoliberalism and of its opponents will find themselves utterly destroyed.
We realise that fascists will see the above warning as a terrorist threat: nothing could be further from the truth, but, as we have repeatedly warned, we stand for the utter destruction of terrorism and of terrorists, regardless of the mask of legality they may wear. We now turn to the work of preparing to defend ourselves and those we are pledged to serve from fascist terrorism, and to counterattack at times and places of our choosing.
That is all for now.
Liberty! Justice! Democracy! Human Rights!
From the Mexican Northwest, Insurgent Subcommander Angeles, Branch of Liaison, Communications, and Investigations, Clandestine Commando "Division of the North" (Villista National Liberation Front).
╘ 1997 [email protected]
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July 20, 2013 | naked capitalism
A Real News Network interview with Chris Hedges precipitated a lively, thoughtful discussion of the mess we are in as a civilization and whether we can pull ourselves out of what looks like a nosedive.I thought readers might enjoy continuing the exchange, and the latest release in this Real News Network series should provide ample grist for debate. As much as the readers who saw the segment we posted yesterday, which was mainly on whether we could forestall an ecological crisis, tended to think that Hedges was too apocalyptic, I suspect they'll have the opposite reaction today, that his take is too positive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCjMdOo7KkYHere, Hedges laments the lack of an effective left, and blames its death on the "inability to articulate a viable socialism". I'm not sure that was ever possible given the virulence of anti-Communism in the US through the fall of the USSR (and right after that, the Rubinites took over). Look at how Keynes was bastardized in the US (which has also had serious knock-on consequences) because an economic text that was faithful to Keynes by Lorie Tarshis was targeted by, among others, William F. Buckley. As we wrote in ECONNED:
A Canadian student of Keynes, Lorie Tarshis, published an economics textbook in 1947, The Elements of Economics, which included his interpretation of Keynes. It also suggested that markets required government support to attain full employment. It was engaging and well written, and sold well initially, but fell off quickly, the victim of an organized campaign by conservative groups to have the textbook removed. The book, and by implication Keynes, was inaccurately charged with calling for government ownership of enterprise.
Any taint of Communist leanings would damage the career of a budding academic. So aside from his refusal to accept some fundamental elements of Keynes's construct, [Paul] Samuelson had another reason to distance himself from the General Theory. Samuelson said he was well aware of the "virulence of the attack on Tarshis" and penned his text "carefully and lawyer like" to deflect similar attacks.
Hedges also believes we can still have a radical uprising in America that would change the power dynamics. I'm at a loss to see how that happens. I'm told that protests against the then almost certain US entry into the Iraq War were very effectively tamped down in New York City, that the protestors (estimated at as many as 1 million, certainly well over 250,000) who were trying to get to the UN were barred at Second Avenue and shunted up into Harlem, resulting in a pathetic-looking crowd for broadcast consumption at the official site. And that was a decade before the 17-city paramilitary crackdown of Occupy Wall Street.
But more important, unlike Europe, massing on the street is just not how Americans do things. Large scale sustained protests have been the province only of the downtrodden (labor organizers, later the civil rights movement) and students (with issues of their own in the Vietnam war and as sympathizers to and supporters of radicals). A good American bourgeois identity and demonstrations don't sit well together. Students are more conservative than ever, thanks to 30 years of neoliberal indoctrination, and even if those that have more idealistic impulses would sensibly be deterred by what an arrest record would do to their job prospects, particularly if they have student debt.
One other bit I believe that Hedges misses in his view that Obama is mediocre. No, Obama has done a fantastic job, just not one that will prove to have done the public well. By happenstance, Lambert flagged a 2011 essay in Aljazeera by William Robinson, Global capitalism and 21st century fascism, which describes clearly the role that Obama was meant to and has ably filled:
A neofascist insurgency is quite apparent in the United States. This insurgency can be traced back several decades, to the far-right mobilisation that began in the wake of the crisis of hegemony brought about by the mass struggles of the 1960s and the 1970s, especially the Black and Chicano liberation struggles and other militant movements by third world people, counter-cultural currents, and militant working class struggles.
neofascist forces re-organised during the years of the George W Bush government. But my story here starts with Obama's election.
The Obama project from the start was an effort by dominant groups to re-establish hegemony in the wake of its deterioration during the Bush years (which also involved the rise of a mass immigrant rights movement). Obama's election was a challenge to the system at the cultural and ideological level, and has shaken up the racial/ethnic foundations upon which the US republic has always rested. However, the Obama project was never intended to challenge the socio-economic order; to the contrary; it sought to preserve and strengthen that order by reconstituting hegemony, conducting a passive revolution against mass discontent and spreading popular resistance that began to percolate in the final years of the Bush presidency.
The Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci developed the concept of passive revolution to refer to efforts by dominant groups to bring about mild change from above in order to undercut mobilisation from below for more far-reaching transformation. Integral to passive revolution is the co-option of leadership from below; its integration into the dominant project. Dominant forces in Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere in the Middle East and North America are attempting to carry out such a passive revolution. With regard to the immigrant rights movement in the United States – one of the most vibrant social movements in that country -moderate/mainstream Latino establishment leaders were brought into the Obama and Democratic Party fold – a classic case of passive revolution – while the mass immigrant base suffers intensified state repression.
Obama's campaign tapped into and helped expand mass mobilisation and popular aspirations for change not seen in many years in the United States. The Obama project co-opted that brewing storm from below, channelled it into the electoral campaign, and then betrayed those aspirations, as the Democratic Party effectively demobilised the insurgency from below with more passive revolution.
Thus while Hedges is correct to point to increasing anger and dislocation in the US, I'm not optimistic that it will be channeled effectively, and if by anyone, it's not likely to be from the deflated left. A general strike would be a galvanizing event but I don't see how that gets done. I suspect we'll see more and more random violence as frustrated individuals lash out. And that sort of violence will serve as the perfect pretext for more and more aggressive policin
g and surveillance.
Hugh, July 20, 2013 at 3:31 am
It seems to me that passive revolution is just another word for class war.
It is pretty much standard practice of the elites to demonize a term like socialism by associating it with the tyranny of the Soviet Union, and then use it to smear any program or effort that benefits the 99%. Personally, I prefer to sidestep it and talk about society and the 99%.
Change is possible, though reform is not. We need to build a mass movement based on a readily understandable explanation of the current situation, a vision of the kind of society we want to build, and the commitment we are asking from everyone to make it happen.
We have powerful messages, and there is great discontent in the country. We need to marry the two together. This is not rocket science, but it does require organization and a certain clarity and directness in language.
wes, July 20, 2013 at 4:28 am
from Mexico July 20, 2013 at 2:18 pmi understand your preference for sidestepping the discourse of socialism in favor of one of society and the 99%. however, i think it's ultimately only useful in a limited tactical sense, a narrative opening to evade initial ideological blockages, and at some point youll have to have a strategy of reintroducing the sidestepped discourse–for a number of reasons including the rehabilitation of an important corpus which really lets you set today's issues in a properly historical context, and even more importantly because anything to the left of nixon is going to be branded socialist anyway, regardless of what you do.
As an aside, gramsci uses a lot of slightly obfuscated language due to the circumstances under which he was writing (as a political prisoner in mussolini's italy). subaltern instead of proletariat, etc. in the intervening years they've taken on useful shades of meaning relative to the original unobfuscated terms (eg, subaltern studies isn't necessarily the same as something like "proletarian studies" would be), but in the context of gramsci himself, you can mostly mentally unobfuscate it without any issues.
Banger July 20, 2013 at 2:23 pmBanger says:
The problem, Hugh, is that your 99% does not agree with your view of the world.
I think one of the problems is that most of the left leadership hails from elite academic circles, and in addition to their ideological blinders hasn't given much thought as to what poor and working-class people really think. The elite leftist leadership has an idealized version of the lower socio-economic orders that doesn't square terribly well with reality. Though I'm no longer working-class, I was born and raised in it so maybe have a little bit better handle on how it thinks than those who were born into the upper or middle classes.
I can suggest two studies to correct some of the misperceptions.
1) "Reciprocity and the Welfare State" by Christina M. Fong, Samuel Bowles, and Herbert Gintis
Equally striking is the fact that among those with annual family incomes of less than $10,000 who did not expect to be better off in five years, 32 percent report that the government should not redistribute wealth by heavy taxes on the rich, and 23 percent say that the poor should help themselves rather than having the government "make every possible effort to improve the…position of the poor."1
http://www3.unisi.it/criss/download/disc/fong_bowles_gintis.pdf
2) Code of the Street: Decency, Violence and the Moral Life of the Inner City by Elijah Anderson
Racism, the changing economy, unemployment, and changing social values all affect the people of the community. But the grandmother, particularly if middle-aged or elderly, often takes an ideologically conservative view and tends to have little tolerance for structural explanations. Given her prior experience in the local community in the days of the manufacturing economy, in matters of idleness and unemployment she is ready to blame the victim, because she feels that there is work to be had for those who are willing to do it and that people can abstain from doing wrong if they want to. It is her belief that the various social problems plaguing the community stem more from personal irresponsibility than from any flaw in the wider system.
[….]
[The decent daddy] tends to have little patience with men who fail to meet their responsibilities as fathers or husbands. Intolerant of excuses that blame discrimination or the lack of jobs, he holds individuals responsible, not the system, and sees resorting to "aid," or welfare, as showing a lack of gumption. He admits that racism is a problem, but he also knows that it can be a lame excuse for not applying oneself to the task at hand. He believes that in this world you make your own bed and that you can succeed if you try. With such presuppositions he approaches the young men he finds unemployed on the streets today. He truly finds it difficult to sympathize with those who cannot find work, let alone with those who do not want to work.
[….]
It is understandable that the traditional old heads and other decent people of the community should focus on the idea of individual responsibility. These people believe that whatever success they have achieved in their own lives has been the result of personal determination, and thus they are inclined to blame those who have not been successful for not having made enough of an effort. Not to blame the victim would be to make it too easy for those victims of innercity problems. And it would give the decent people no way of distinguishing themselves from the street people.
Excellent comment–fills in the blanks very nicely. I will only add that the opinions you describe are a result of a conscious mind-control regime that has gone on for a century. The left has been unable to break through it but, rather, it has accepted the mainstream narrative in most areas–just not those listed. In fact, for the left to come to life it must reject ALL of the mainstream narrative. It shouldn't be that hard because if you use the rule of evidence almost everything that we are being told as true is false.
ictus92, July 21, 2013 at 5:07 pm
To paraphrase Madeline Albright: "What's the point of creating a totalitarian police state if you're not going to use it?"
So where is the American totalitarian state going? If you look at the NDAA and the discussion around repealing the Posse Comitatus Act, the key words include quelling "domestic civil unrest"… So what are the "deep government" types anticipating so hysterically?
Well, the financial crisis keeps grinding away and is about to enter another phase of collapse as "quantitative easing" has run its course. Interest rates are rising, posing "technical insolvency" of the Federal Reserve itself. What this means is that time's up for the 46 million in the Food Stamp Supplemental Program; 56 million getting Social Security retirement or disability benefits; and at least 20 million more needing full time employment. Obviously there's some overlap, but the total number of people living on the margins of subsistence pushes 30% of the population.
For these, they face an immediate "Final Solution"… not exactly direct extermination, but death by deprivation, illness etc. Can work camps be far off for these tens of millions and the many millions more living paycheck to paycheck? This population and their sympathizers comprise the tinder for "civil unrest". Hence the corollary to the famous "Collect it all" (communications) is "control it all" (civil disorder following further economic collapse).
Furthermore, prolonged neglect of key infrastructure will lead inevitably to severe food, water and electric power access shortages - another source of civil unrest potential.
Of course, overseas the totalitarian police state eliminates all expression of opposition that can change policies in the quest for "Permanent War" and "full spectrum" military dominance. This ends in global military confrontation… just as the financial crisis of the 30's gave rise to another World War… only this time around world war will pitch towards thermonuclear war in short order. That's how totalitarian regimes collapse into catastrophe, dragging the rest of us to an unpleasant demise.
Unfortunately, I don't think there's a damn thing any of us can do to arrest this beserk Levithan…
tongorad, July 20, 2013 at 3:21 pm
"This is America, not Denmark. In this country, tens of millions of people choose to watch FoxNews not simply because Americans are credulous idiots or at the behest of some right-wing corporate cabal, but because average Americans respect viciousness.
They are attracted to viciousness for a lot of reasons. In part, it reminds them of their bosses, whom they secretly adore. Americans hate themselves for the way they behave in public, always smiling and nodding their heads with accompanying really?s and uh-huhs to show that they're listening to the other person, never having the guts to say what they really feel. So they vicariously scream and bully others into submission through right-wing surrogate-brutes. Spending time watching Sean Hannity is enough for your average American white male to feel less cowardly than he really is.
The left won't accept this awful truth about the American soul, a beast that they believe they can fix "if only the people knew the Truth."
But what if the Truth is that Americans don't want to know the Truth? What if Americans consciously choose lies over truth when given the chance–and not even very interesting lies, but rather the blandest, dumbest and meanest lies? What if Americans are not a likeable people? The left's wires short-circuit when confronted with this terrible possibility; the right, on the other hand, warmly embraces Middle America's rank soul and exploits it to their full advantage. The Republicans know Americans better than the left. They know that it's not so much Goering's famous "bigger lie" that works here, but the dumber and meaner the lie, the more the public wants to hear it repeated."
"We, The Spiteful" by Mark Ames
Dave, July 20, 2013 at 8:18 pm
Please consider that the "right" is far more realistic in their assessment of human nature. The "left" wants things to be according to what they think it should be, mostly because of their left wing educators. The majority of humans are not perfectible.
Even Asians, with their highly socialized societies, have behaved very badly towards those outside their country.
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